Aberrant
by menme
Summary: In trouble with a different kind of police. In love, maybe. In doubt about everything he believes. 1st Chapter of a House/OFC, somewhat AU.
1. You Must Not Know About Me

(A/N: This is an AU in one small aspect, more an alternate history. Same House, slightly different political America he lives in. The views expressed by the characters – either way - are not necessarily those of the author. As always, have fun! :-)

**Aberrant **

1. You Must Not Know About Me

Green eyes, blue eyes, black. Brown. Women's eyes of late had begun to snag him, pretty nurses' eyes strafing scorn across the joke his life had become, whores' eyes at night locked only on the money waiting on the dresser, a scarier joke. The mother in the clinic was pretty. She had brown eyes. Her son was too small.

"Growth hormone deficiency," he told them. "Easily treatable." Soccer-mom relaxed with relief, her petite figure, hips taut beneath her skirt, leaning back into the desk.

"What do we do?" she asked. Her eyes were the color of good bourbon.

"You do nothing. We get a blood count, x-ray the bones, then we'll make up a batch of hormones for Tiny Tim here."

"How do you make a hormone?" the boy asked.

"Just don't pay her."

In the sudden silence, as the brown eyes cooled, Cuddy stuck her head in the door.

"Need to see you."

"B&D's in Room 3 today. Harvey Schuyler from Gynecology's in charge. Brought his whip –"

"Now, House, out here." He left his patient swinging his stunted legs from the table, his mother's scowl as dark as it could get, and followed his boss into the hall.

"Your voice," he informed her, "tells me you've either been to see Harvey or you need to."

"Do you know who Michael Nealy is?"

The question brought him up short. "Doesn't everyone?"

She shoved a file at him. "Nealy's sick – and he's asking for you."

That burst of curiosity firing in his brain, the first in weeks, his own special poison, made him peruse the file. "So don't they have doctors up at the prison?" Beyond the half-open blinds in the clinic foyer, rain flailed against the windows. The waiting area was full. Patients clutched their legs or their heads or sat passively, spattered across the seats and leaning against the walls. It was raining sick people. Raining in his head. The file was boring. He slammed it in disgust and thrust it back to her. "There's nothing wrong with him."

"He has a heart problem."

"Wow. Now that's more interesting than the lunch I was going to steal from Wilson. Let's see, what could it be? Maybe the little-known medical fact that terrorists don't _have_ hearts. The answer is no. I'm not treating Michael Nealy."

"Good. Okay. Never thought I'd say this but I'm actually relieved you're refusing to do something. Still, these people want to talk to –"

"Call them back, tell them I've moved to China for the air."

"They're sitting in my office –"

"Get Foreman or Cameron to do it." He had already limped down the hall, leaving her frustrated "House!" to dangle in the air behind him.

In the restroom he stared at his face in the mirror. Even his own eyes held scorn for him. The crippled addict at forty-seven. A good prime number. He thought he looked older than that. In that wonderland behind the glass, he supposed, he was a different person, virile, in control of matters, the world turning to him to acknowledge his accomplishments. A place where he could shake off the feeling that the world was only turning away, turning in its daily grind and leaving him behind, his hobbled life out of whack with life itself.

He rolled a pill between his fingers and popped it into his mouth. Jerk a clinic patient's chain, push Cuddy's buttons, refuse a case. It was a typical day in his life and that was the horror of it.

In his office he switched on a lamp against the dark morning and drew the blinds away to watch the rain shadows. As he turned a man and woman entered the office.

"Dr. House?" the man asked. He was blond, good-looking in a soft-doll way, too pink in the lips and cheeks. He had a British – no, Australian – accent.

"Turn around," he told him. "Walk back out the door, then read what it says on that door. That is, if they teach them to read by your age Down Under." He saw the woman's gaze narrow in an elegantly repressed smirk.

The man proffered a badge. "We're CA. We'd like to ask you a few questions about Michael Nealy."

That twinge of fear, his heart speeding up, he told himself, was natural. No one wanted CA on their neck. These two Nazi wannabes had to be the people Cuddy had said were in her office. Instead of persuading them to leave she had gone the wuss route and sent them straight to him. He managed his sarcastic grin and plopped into his chair. "Oh, _excellent_. This moron Nealy asks for me by name and that makes me an instant suspect. Does Christian Affairs go after all its cases like this? Because if you do, you can come work for me in diagnostics, Detective –" He checked the badge the man had laid on his desk, "- Chase. I've got some chicken bones we can throw down and read –"

"Dr. House, do you know Nealy personally?"

"Sure. We used to blow up buildings together back in the eighties." Again, the woman caught it faster than her partner. She looked away, lips curled, while Detective Chase's mouth was still opening and closing. "Tell me, how does an Aussie wind up working for Christian Affairs in the good old U.S. of A. anyway?"

"I moved here when I was thirteen." Defensive, which was good. He had him off his guard.

"And you just always dreamed of being a detective. I bet you've still got your secret decoder ring. Or was it the plastic gun -"

"What we want to know –" Detective Chase spoke too loudly, irritation making his accent stronger, " – is _why_ you believe Mike Nealy would ask for you by name."

"There's this thing called a reputation."

"The doctors up at Kearney have ruled out anything unusual. It's simply heart disease. The man's sixty-five. He's lived a hard life, the last bit of it in prison. But for some reason he's become obsessed with having you check him."

"Look, I don't know Nealy. Never met him. Never even wasted a thought on the guy in the last – how many years has he been in Kearney? Seventeen? Besides which, all of this doesn't matter because I'm not going up there."

"Why not?" The woman's voice surprised him. She had stood slightly behind Detective Chase, mute while they bantered, watching him. He had taken her for the silent partner. "Aren't you curious?"

"About what?"

"The same thing we are. The why."

Give her your best shrug. "Nealy's heart's playing ping-pong with him. The guy sees he's going to die and he wants to prolong his miserable life, for some unfathomable reason. He figures I can just reach out with my magic wand or scalpel or whatever and save him. He thinks I'm God."

He felt his mouth bend around the last word, anticipating the reaction. Detective Chase's face went red. The boy-cop leaned his hands on the desk. "Do you know how _easy_ it would be for us to make life _hard_ for you? Maybe you should read what the badge says. Another remark like that -"

The woman's hand was suddenly on her partner's arm. With the slightest pressure she seemed to give him a sign and he glanced her way, then sank into the chair behind him. She took the other chair. "I'm sorry, Dr. House," she began. "We seem to have made the wrong impression. You're not a suspect."

As though an optical illusion had reversed on him, foreground and background switching places, he realized the mistake he had made. She had been in charge all along.

"This is a routine procedure on our part. Any visitor to a prisoner as important as Nealy has to be…scoped out." The touch of irony, the little shrug, get him on our side, don't we all just hate useless procedure, was so masterful it made him smile.

"I'm not a visitor," he reminded her. "Because I'm not going there."

She sat back and crossed her legs, the nondescript skirt whispering against her knees above sleek muscular calves. Oh yes, she was good. It gave him a second to study her. She was older than her partner, maybe thirty-five. It was his day for eyes and hers were a color he had never contemplated, or not with interest, arctic green merging to frosted blue, sea depths iced over and left to harden. He could imagine them making a scary impression on a suspected Christian. She sported white-blonde hair, the kind that came naturally, pulled back in a simple braid framing ordinary features. Her figure mirrored those terrific calves, but it was nothing he hadn't seen before. Except for her eyes he would not have called her pretty, or at least not to her face. Haughty, perhaps. Sexually wise.

The thought, coming out of nowhere, surprised him.

"The problem," she told him (_is that I don't get any_, he cursed himself, _which makes me hot when I need to be cool_), "is that the government can't be seen to be mistreating Christians, even if they are banned by law. Especially a famous one like Nealy. If he doesn't get the _best_ treatment –" the eyes flicked up and down him as though she didn't quite believe it – "and then he dies, it will be a rallying point for all those little legalize-Christianity movements. Nealy the martyr. We don't need that right now."

"You're telling me I have to sacrifice myself for my country."

"Not yourself. Just an afternoon of your time. Go up to Kearney and look at him. Confirm the prison doctors' diagnosis, so everyone knows we did everything we could for him."

"I can do that from here. I've read the chart. All I need to do is throw those chicken bones."

"You need to see him."

"Can't we just tell everyone I went?"

She smiled and then hesitated. "There's one other thing." (_Yes, your hair_, he wanted to say, _do something with it, corkscrew curls or a bob, anything to bring out those eyes_). "You probably know Nealy never confessed to the bombings. A lot of the evidence was circumstantial."

"I vaguely remember the trial being what we used to call a farce and has now come to be known as due process."

"The guards around Nealy think he may be ready to make that confession now. From some things he's said." She was watching him so closely he felt chilled, the pulse of rain behind him at the window matching the cold beat of his veins. "A visitor – a new face – may be just what he needs to start talking."

"You want me to spy on him."

Detective Chase leaned in. "If he did talk, we would expect you to report back to us."

A glance from his partner stilled him. The woman was definitely on top. "We would _ask_ that you let us know," she corrected. She extracted a card from her blazer, held it to him and stood, a smooth motion without a rustle. Her partner stood with her. "It doesn't have to be today, or even tomorrow, Dr. House. As I understand it, Nealy's arrhythmia is not that bad. He's still got a while. Take your time if you want. But tell us you'll do everything you can – on both fronts."

He shrugged. "Okay, Mom." Beneath the stamp _Christian Affairs_, the card in his hand read _Detective A. McCullough_. They were turning to leave. "So what does the A. stand for? Adolf?"

Her glance back seemed to hold genuine curiosity. "Am I really that bad?" she asked, the question so abruptly personal, so…searching – as though his opinion mattered - that he opened his mouth to say no, then she smiled that tiny smirk again, a clear _gotcha_, and left without waiting for an answer.

His two fellows collided with them as they went out the door, Cameron's gaze following the Australian down the hall.

"Christian Affairs," he told them just to savor Cameron's shocked expression. "Whew, am I glad they didn't find the Bible hidden in my desk."

Foreman shook his head and sank into the chair that A. McCullough had just vacated. "You and the law, yes," he reasoned. "You and religion – no."

"Listen up." He turned to contemplate the rain, the long drive. "You two are holding down the fort – and the patients - this afternoon. There's somewhere I have to go."

****

(Chp 2 will be ready soon. Reviews are always welcome.)


	2. Bucket's Got a Hole In It

2. Bucket's Got a Hole In It

Kearney Theist Prison was a sprawling complex of squat white buildings set far back from highway 95. Aside from the high wall that bristled impressively with barbed wire and cameras, it might have been a clinic rather than a maximum-security prison – rehab, he thought sourly, for architects addicted to really ugly buildings – and he remembered that it had been converted from a mental institution. The guard at the gate seemed too young for the bullet-proof vest he wore. The kid approached the car, his rifle clutched to him like a lover, and he thought of letting loose some remark about how Kevlar could make anyone look stylish, but instead he merely held up his physician ID and said, "Here to save a killer's life." The kid bent to peruse the inside of the car. "You the one for Nealy?" The question was significant. It meant they were eagerly anticipating him. A feeling that was not mutual. A trunk check and then he was told where to park. The clouds that had scattered before a washed blue sky as he drove had returned with a vengeance, leaving the buildings drab and ill-defined. As though the place attracted dark. In the front office a guard with a florid birthmark disfiguring half his face, the kind called a port-wine stain, waved him through a metal detector, patted him down and tried to take his cane. For a second they played tug-of-war.

"Oh come on."

"Regulations."

"I have to walk down there. Or do you have those cute little airport carts for me to ride on?" Behind the guard stretched a long featureless hall, with nothing to hold onto, broken only by a series of barred security doors. He studied the guard's birthmark. "Ever heard of neodymium lasers?" He pitched his voice to serious. "They can get rid of that nowadays, you know." The guard's face flushed in anger, the stain shadowing to purple. "Or most of it. You need to do something because it's started hypertrophying, there around the mouth. Usually happens later in life. It's why you're having trouble saying certain words. Like 'Regulations'."

The guy broke their staredown first, turning away with a thoughtful grimace, and waved him on. "Follow him."

Another guard led him down the hall. The steel doors lining both sides, he reminded himself, their tiny caged viewing windows closed, all held prisoners who – at least here at Kearney – were in for committing acts of violence against the innocent in the name of their nutty concept called religion. Theists, of the worst sort. Still, it all smacked of overkill. "Tell me something," he asked his tour guide, a burly man with arms like a wrestler's. "I always understood they kept these people dosed to the gills on Norxylam. That's the whole point of their – what do you guys call it? – encapsulation, isn't it? What do you need all this security for? I mean, aside from the self-gratification - I'm sure it feels very good to stroke your gun when you're feeling nervous - but still."

The guard glanced at him as though he had merely cleared his throat, and stopped to unlock a door.

He had visualized Michael Nealy's face as he drove up, the grim court videos that had become part of recent history, the mild philosophy professor gone bad, his shock of red hair like a metaphor for the violence he was said to espouse. The pictures had nothing to do with the man who approached him now, his hand outstretched. Older naturally, his thinning hair combed back into dark red strands, and yet something more subtle had changed. A force gone. A fire that, in its sheer belief in its own integrity, had been almost admirable throughout his trial, in spite of any despicable acts it might have fueled.

"Dr. House?"

He barely had time to take in the room. Incongruously bright, the clouds on this side of the building seemingly vanished, allowing the sun to pour through the grille window. A bed, a desk, a swivel chair. Ferns in plastic tubs on the sill. Not a cell - a bedroom. And the guard behind him, wedging the door wide open, calling out in the friendliest tone he could imagine: "Stays open, Mike."

"You bet."

The guard left.

Charcoal drawings on the walls. Landscapes mostly, a middle-aged woman, gentle-faced. If they were Nealy's he had an expert hand.

He ignored the outstretched hand, pushing past to sit on the bed with its bright yellow quilt, and rubbed his aching leg.

In an amused tone Nealy said: "Make yourself at home, Dr. House."

"Thanks. I think I will." He saw the terrorist's eyes linger on his cane, and it crossed his mind how many times he had been fooled by psychotics in his career – their salamander quiet drawing him in until he was close enough to be attacked. Nealy crossed the room and sat at the desk. His gait was slightly off-kilter, that of a person hiding pain – a thing he had a radar for - and he filed it away for later use. "Only a very compelling personality," the prisoner told his visitor, "could have gotten the guard to let him keep the cane." His eyes narrowed. "It's why you're here, Dr. House."

"Actually, from the way your chart sounded, I expected to be talking to you through an oxygen mask in the infirmary."

"Someone must have exaggerated to get you here."

"Was that someone you?"

"No." Nealy frowned. "I have certain symptoms the doctors here are dismissing and that I think are significant. I get ten minutes a week on the computer, without mailing services of course, and I spent my last month's allotment researching you before I asked for you. I know a lot about you."

"Believe me, all those restraining orders are a bunch of bull."

Nealy laughed, then grew silent. "I can't breathe during the yard breaks, Dr. House." A shadow filled his eyes, the first sign of fear he had seen in the man. "My heart keeps trying to go left when I go right. That's how it feels at least. Missing a beat. Sometimes it hurts so bad I think I've been stabbed."

"I imagine there are a lot of people out there with a voodoo doll of you."

"It's myocarditis."

"Ah, always go with the amateur-ass diagnosis. You get more mileage out of it." The small medical bag the guard had allowed him to keep, after deboning it of anything halfway sharp – leaving practically nothing but the stethoscope – lay beside him on the bed and he opened it. "If your heart wall's been damaged by inflammation, it's from some infection recently. Come here."

"I haven't been sick in years." Nealy sat beside him and unbuttoned his shirt. A wave of nausea hit him. The man's chest was covered with eschars – thick oozing scabs that could only have come from burns. They looked about a week old. Older scars lay below them. He froze lifting the steth to his ears, aware that he was staring. Nealy caught it. "They're – uh – pressed at the moment to get me to confess. I'm not sure why, after all this time."

For some reason his throat wasn't working right. "That guy…" He cleared it. "That guy at the door. He was so friendly."

"Present at all my – sessions," Nealy assured him. "One of the more enthusiastic ones." His small smile was heartbreaking. "They're all that way. They genuinely like me. And they genuinely believe in their right to torture me for the good of their country."

"How –" Something was struggling up inside him, memories, the beautiful ugly looking-glass of the double-bind, someone who loves you and hates you, who beats you and brings you home gifts. He supposed it was worse for a child. Nealy was a grown-up. With a mind strong enough to exchange jokes with men who would later gleefully beat and burn him and not be warped by it. Or maybe it had driven him over the edge. Maybe he had charcoal-drawing fantasies of his guards' mangled bodies hidden beneath the mattress. The scarier question was what made _them_ capable of playing good cop/bad cop all in one. Something his father, a Navy man and very patriotic, used to say – in the quiet times between the beatings and the gifts – nudged at him but he couldn't recall it.

Then Nealy's heart was pounding in his ears through the stethoscope, the pulse of the worst terrorist America had ever known, murderer of forty-thousand people. It was just a heart. An arrhythmic one, the beat skittering away inside the steth.

"Your heart's got about as much rhythm as the coked-up drummer in my college band did." From his pocket he unwadded a sheet of paper, Nealy's ECG, which he had grabbed from Cuddy on his way out. Diffuse T wave inversions. Myocarditis was certainly possible. From the file he remembered the prison quacks had run a few titers for common infections, in very hit-and-miss fashion; they might as well have stamped _Don't Care_ on the top of the page. The titers had been negative.

"Could the Norxylam have done this to me?" A glitter in Nealy's eyes made him wonder what the guy was getting at. "Some drugs can damage the heart wall. Anti-psychotics like clozapine."

"Norxylam's not an anti-psychotic. It's an anti-theic. Completely different mechanism from clozapine. But I think you know that."

"Explain it to me, Dr. House." His patient's voice was very soft.

_Lecture time_. "You have an anomaly in your brain. A genetic misalignment between the hippocampal and the fusiform gyrus that works out as pressure on the raphe nuclei. Serotonin and a whole load of other neurotransmitters with cool names get overproduced. Or underproduced in some cases. Perception, memory, all slightly skewed. Eight percent of everyone born will have it. Even fewer will exhibit the signs – a tendency to mysticism, superstition, all the way up to a belief in a god, at which point it's full-blown Theic Syndrome and our superb health-care system kicks in. An anti-theic drug like Norxylam to damp it down, encapsulation of the patient, get him away from normal society, keep the ideas from corrupting the kiddies-"

"Camps."

"Well, not for the likes of you. You get more than wooden barracks in the Nevada desert somewhere. A room of your own, for having acted so wholeheartedly on your nutty beliefs."

"Concentration camps."

The man was going fanatical on him. He didn't need any drum-beating, the throb of pain in his leg rhythm enough to make him want to scream. The damn guard had taken his Vicodin, the risk of any medication finding its way to the prisoner and screwing up his anti-theic regimen too great. His fingers itched for a pill.

"You're a good doctor," Nealy told him. He almost replied _I know_ before the irony registered, a sarcasm in the terrorist's voice tinged with such disappointment it seemed to encompass the entire world. "Have you actually seen the anomaly in the brain of theists?"

"It's hard to detect. The gyral misalignment varies according to gender, or age. The chemical imbalance can be subtle."

"And yet you _believe_ in this anomaly."

"I believe – no – I _know_ that religion is a disease. And that the laws against it are necessary. We're not in the Middle Ages anymore. And I don't need to see a SPECT to prove it. Actions speak louder than brain scans. And bombs speak even louder." Anger roughed his voice. He was wasting his time. "Look – " He stuffed the stethoscope back in his bag and wadded the ECG. "You don't deserve any treatment for your heart. Don't you think it's just time you went ahead and died?"

A calm had returned to Nealy's face, the unbrokenness he remembered admiring from the man's trial. Not arrogance or self-pity, in spite of being despised by the world. Being wished dead by millions. The man knew something about being despised. How you let it run off your back. How you manage to stay yourself.

"I'm sorry," Nealy told him. "For – some reason, I thought you would think differently than the rest of them."

"I do when it comes to betting on an inside straight."

"Is there something you believe in, Dr. House?"

The question was straightforward, yet he felt himself back at school, about to fail a test he hadn't studied for, the teacher someone he might have liked under other circumstances. Nealy had been a professor, he recalled.

"I believe in the practice of medicine and the science it's based on."

"You must believe in some reason for saving lives. The very purpose of all that medicine you practice so well. Why a life has value."

"Human life is its own value. Not because some god says so. And the medicine works because it works, not because someone prays over the patient. Some big guy in the sky with a beard decides this one should die and that one should live?" He saw Nealy grimace. "You might as well believe in the efficacy of Smurfs. Hey, they're blue."

"And some of them have beards." Nealy had laid his face in his hands for a moment, the tiny shake of his head despairing, then he looked away as though seeing his drawings for the first time. "There are a lot of misconceptions about Christianity. The effect of government having forced it to stay underground so long. So, you're saying medicine is your only faith because it's evidence-based. And the Norxylam? Which has no plausible mechanism for its efficacy?" The testing undertone in his voice was back.

"We use lots of drugs without understanding them. The results are all that counts."

"Then tell me one thing, Dr. House. If Norxylam works" – he was approaching some crux, the debater poised in triumph over his point – "If it works…why am I not cured?"

He snapped his bag shut and propped his cane against the floor to stand.

"Why, Dr. House? Why aren't all those people sent off to camps and administered Norxylam reforming? Why don't they come back?"

"Some do."

"Those who were only dallying with Christianity in the first place. The true believers, believe me, never recant. Why isn't the drug repressing their 'anomaly' of faith? Why don't they go back to being 'normal'? Except for my few minutes on the net each month, I've had no contact with the outside world for seventeen years, but even I would have heard if all those Christians constantly bundled off to the camps were returning as good little atheists. Why aren't they? Why is it after swallowing my anti-theic pill this morning, I'm just as theic as I ever was, able to sit here and argue with you about religion?"

"Some minds may be stronger than others." He hadn't known he was going to say it. The man's face beside him altered, acknowledging it as the compliment it was, giving it back by his very gratitude, a look in his eyes that said _Coming from you that means something_.

_Get out_, his alarm warned him. _Or you'll end up liking the guy_.

You don't start liking someone you hate.

He rose to go. Nealy's urgent voice stopped him.

"What am I doing here, Dr. House?"

"Dying, apparently."

"You say actions speak louder than words. What actions did I commit? Other than to say things the government didn't want to hear."

"How about blowing things up?"

"I never blew up anything."

"Your philosophy did. You wrote books advocating violence in the name of religion."

"Have you read any of my books?"

"Besides the fact that they're banned, I just can't seem to get to it. Somehow my mint Swamp Thing comics collection is always more interesting."

"Anomalies you can't see, books you haven't read. Do you often accept what others tell you without checking the facts first?"

_Just leave_. He couldn't make himself head for the door. "Religion is a dangerous concept."

"If I were allowed a Bible in here I could put it in your hands and it wouldn't explode."

"It does in some hands. Look -" He stamped his cane on the floor in frustration, and then wondered if the sound would bring guards down the empty hall. "I know you're not all wild-eyed bombers bent on ripping the world a new asshole. Don't you think I realize most of you just want to live out your kooky theories in peace? Yet there are always those who'll take things too far. In the hands of a very few, religion - your Christian brand of it - turns dangerous."

"It's still just a very few."

"Those few make a big bang when they go up."

"I advocated change – non-violent change. Legalization of Christianity, acknowledgement that religion is not a mental disease. America is the only country ever to ban a religion by government decree. When Dirty May happened, they needed someone to blame. I had written books calling for a different kind of state, different laws – if you read between the lines it was a confession that I was a Christian, the leader of an underground faith, and so - I was it." Fervor made Nealy lean out, reaching with his body as though by an act of will he could stop his visitor leaving. "I'm in here for a thought crime, Dr. House. We're in a thought-repressing regime. For someone who lives for thought, as I believe you do, that should be frightening."

"I try not to think about it."

"Do you really believe I ordered the Dirty May bombings?" The question sank into the stillness around them. "Do you believe I'm responsible for the deaths of forty-thousand people?"

On May 14, 1989, at 12:58 and 1:03 pm respectively, two nuclear devices of the type known as suitcase bombs and that had been stolen from a disintegrating Russia's secret stash, were detonated, one in San Francisco and one in Houston, on busy streets, two kilotons each, incinerating thousands of people in a fraction of a second, flattening blocks for a mile around and poisoning the life every American had known forever after. Those who survived did so only to die more slowly in the aftermath. For weeks afterward children trapped in the petechia-ridden hell of their skin vomited up their little bit of life while cameras rolled. A tiny group of militant Christians, underground since their sect had been made illegal in the thirties, claimed responsibility, proving it by pointing out their warning phone calls made to police moments before the blasts and citing as their inspiration the writings of one Michael Nealy, a college professor with a wife and child, clownish red hair and an assortment of bowties he wore to teach his Philosophy 101 classes and then sported at his subsequent trial, suburbia's nobody. A scapegoat. "I can't even kill spiders," he had famously said on the stand, inviting ridicule, shoring up the hate of those who wanted to see him burn. He admitted to being a practising Christian, the spiritual leader of a terrifyingly large underground group. He denied any code of violence. He denied involvement with the terrorists. A man whose wife and twin boys had died in the bombings stood up in the courtroom and shot at Nealy with a gun snuck through security, hitting him in the leg. The limp, House realized.

The man had no bowtie now. Seventeen years had taken their price. Nealy's eyes had lost the challenging intensity he remembered from the courtroom videos, and yet, as he looked now, _really_ looked for the first time since entering the room, he realized there was something there in the infamous face, a trait he saw so rarely in those around him it enticed him when he did; a hint of peace, sanity so far beyond the influences and peer pressures of society that it became itself a kind of insanity, an aberration. What he strove for in his own life, in his practice - fighting his fellows and Cuddy and anyone who got in the way - and yet never attained. Michael Nealy was a man who was completely himself.

"No," he told him. "I don't believe you had anything to do with it."

Far down the hall a guard called to another, a door clanged, then quiet descended. He thought of the others in their cells like tombs. Nealy saw the look.

"Sometimes," Nealy told him, "in the underground groups I ran that were trying to bring about change peacefully, someone would join who was different, with a glint in their eye that I didn't like, always a loner. This person would talk about God's wrath more than anything else, and would get rabid – rabid as in foam – about the need for violence. I always threw these people out. My only mistake was not to inform to the police on them. I always justified it by telling myself they hadn't done anything. I should have realized – any society has these people in it. They're the true sick ones. They would latch onto any cause if it meant they could go out and blow people up for it. They have nothing – absolutely nothing – to do with Christianity. Christianity is about peace, which the public would know if Christian writings hadn't been banned for so long that it's all become the subject of rumor and conjecture. No, it's these twisted broken people who did what they did and then called it Christianity. It wouldn't have to be many, a cell of three or four – some of whom I might have known - and a good source of funds to buy the bombs. I believe as strongly as you do that those animals should be here, in my place."

"Now, you don't want to bag on your friends."

"Didn't you listen to what I said, Dr. House? They were never Christians, just appropriating the title. Dirty May was their baby. After the bombings I told the authorities everything I knew about the ones who had been in my group before I threw them out, their names, descriptions, but they had gone to ground. They're insane. They're still out there."

He felt bile at the back of his throat.

"Everything our world became after those two explosions, Dr. House, was created by that small handful of sick people, and a call to the police that used the word Christian. It's the reason I'm here. The reason there's a Christian Affairs, to chase down all those heinous criminals down on their knees praying and then pack them off to camps and treat them with a dubious drug. We're in a spiral we can't get out of. For hundreds of years Christianity was nothing but a few sects here and there that everyone ignored because they were just a handful of nuts anyway, just a remnant of something larger left over after the Middle Ages and gone down the tubes and who cares about ancient history. Then government makes them the scapegoat during the Depression, secret cabals out to topple world governments, which was always just wacko, and McCarthy with his Christian-hunts in the fifties makes it worse. Then Dirty May demonizes them so much no non-Christian out there knows anymore what Christianity really stands for. And can't find out, because the moment anyone _wants_ to find out, they're already a suspect. They have a gyral misalignment and lo and behold, we have a drug to treat their 'illness'. The very mechanism by which a society knows if things are working or not - free speech – is turned on its head. Speak freely at all and you're arrested. And all the while the real bombers are still out there waiting for their chance."

It was the need for a pill that was making him nauseous, he told himself. The pain in his leg reaching up into his head, a pressure pounding to get out.

"My group has new leaders now, people I handpicked before I ever came here." Nealy's voice was soft, electrifying. "I know they want to bring the real bombers to justice as badly as I do. It became our new goal, the real Christians' goal. Find the terrorists, show the world that they are not us."

"Why are you telling me all this?" It came out louder than he intended.

"There's a reason you're here, Dr. House, aside from my medical problem."

He thought of Detective A. McCullough, her eyes like icy seas. "Yeah, so you can confess to me. Oh _no_, don't tell me. You're suddenly going to confess after all." He imagined McCullough's look of approval if he brought back some tidbit about Nealy that CA hadn't known before. Had to make him ass of the year, dreaming of impressing a woman he had only met for two minutes. Nealy looked disappointed that he could still suspect him. He shrugged. "Christian Affairs seems to think that's what you wanted to talk to me for."

The prisoner sighed. "I might have exaggerated a certain willingness to confess. It did get you here. No, I'm going to ask you for something. A favor from my first visitor from outside in over ten years. Someone intelligent enough to see reason." Nealy stood abruptly and approached him at the door until he was close enough to glance into the hall and assure himself it was still empty. He stood very close. When he spoke it was subliminal, almost mouthed. If the room was bugged it would have a hard time picking up his voice.

"I want you to run a message for me."

****

Outside he stopped to swallow a pill from the bottle the guard had returned to him. Sun glared off the still-wet blacktop, all the clouds having scattered. Several yards from his car a dark-blue Escort had parked in a deserted area. He registered the elbow at the window, the thin apricot sleeve of a blouse he recognized, and he hobbled to it before he knew what he was doing. The sun after so much rain left him light-headed.

"Patience is apparently not one of CA's virtues," he prompted her.

McCullough smiled up from the driver's seat. "I have places to be and bosses to please. If Nealy told you anything, I need to know now."

"Oh he gave me a bunch of goodies to distribute at will. What do I get for divulging?"

"Us off your back." The faint hint of surprise at his success turned to disdain as it dawned on her. "He didn't tell you a thing, did he?"

He bent to look in the car. "You ditch your Aussie wombat?" She was still watching him, fastidiously. She was good at it. He felt like he'd never been watched before. "Nothing," he admitted. "Some talk about his group, the new leaders. No names. The rest was all about proselytizing me. I'm headed off now to go get baptized. Wanna come?"

"He didn't…ask you to do anything for him, did he? Other than the medical matter."

Sun, barbed wire, the glint of light off the window of the guard tower in the corner of the grounds. He gripped the top of his cane harder. _Concentrate on her blouse_. That top button that had been so demur back in his office, open now to the heat, revealing a hint of a pleasant swelling he wouldn't have associated with a cop. He wondered how she fit into a Kevlar vest. It helped him focus.

"Have you ever met Nealy, Detective?"

The question seemed to trouble her. "You sound like you think I should."

"He's an interesting person."

That look again, drilling into him. As if it understood more about him than he did himself. They recruited them well in CA.

She broke the tension by reaching for the ignition. "If there's anything you can recall that might be important," she said very quietly, "you have my number."

"Sure, Adolf." He turned to go.

"It's Ailyn." It stopped him dead. She was looking at him. Her eyes had changed. To his absolute amazement she spelled it for him.

"Well," he fought for a response. "Now that we're on a first-name basis, maybe you can show me your jackboot collection some time."

She smiled. (That made two in a minute, he thought. Maybe we're getting somewhere). "You'd better hope not, Dr. House. Because if it ever comes to that, the only thing you'll be thinking about is where to get a good lawyer."

She backed the car out and drove away.

****

"_Okay - unusual, difficult. Vivid."_

"_That's an odd choice of word."_

"_He's an odd person."_

"_Are you still prepared to do this? You're basically being asked to spy on him."_

"_It's nothing I haven't done before. It's my job."_

"_Your job is to go after Christians. Arrest them, interrogate them. You've managed to make a name for yourself doing that."_

"_I have, haven't I?"_

"_But we all know he's not a Christian. This will be different. More – personal. You'll have to get close to him."_

"_I'm still game. It's just taking me a while to get my head around him." Silence. "Vivid's…not that odd a word. Is it?"_

****

The young woman was where the cell-phone call had said she would be. He tried not to stare as he stood in front of her, studying the Saturday morning park for a moment instead: kids playing ball, joggers far away on the lakeside paths. A breeze stirred leaves at his feet. "You people can be very surprising," he finally told the woman and settled onto the bench beside her.

"This way we don't need code words."

"Right. Leave the codes for the messages."

"So you looked at it."

He tutted disgust at her naivety. "Would you really have expected me not to?" He slipped Nealy's paper with its complex code he hadn't been able to crack across the bench to her and watched her pocket it, watched her brown hair move in the breeze.

"I'm glad you came to accept he's not directing new bomb squads from prison," she told him.

"Maybe I didn't. Maybe I _want_ you guys to blow up another city." She grimaced. He shrugged. "I know the message itself is not important. He's not directing terrorist activities from prison, not at the rate of one message in ten years anyway. I assume it's some letter of encouragement, 'Keep praying, people'." He gave her a sidelong glance. "I know the importance of it is that he got me to deliver it. It says something – to anyone who knows me, I suppose – about his powers of persuasion, that he's still the leader he was." _The strength of his presence_, he almost said. From her look he knew he was right. "I'm the message."

"More than you know."

From the side of the lake a child screamed in play and he turned his head startled. "On edge?" she asked softly.

"Christian Affairs has been following me this past week. I'm fairly sure I lost them on the freeway coming over here, but they're everywhere. Sort of like you people."

"They would have suspected Brother Mike was going to give you a message to deliver." The _brother_ made him wince.

"Believe me, that's why we came up with a very special place to hide it on me. And then they didn't even search me coming out anyway." She gave him a questioning look. "Oh, wouldn't you love to know?"

She smiled and stood to leave. Some memory irked him. "'This is a country founded on doing the right thing,'" he quoted. She paused and gazed at him. "My father used to say that all the time. I remembered it while I was talking to Nealy." She seemed content to wait until he found words. The questions in his head felt warm and heavy, stones weighing him down. "You're young," he said.

"Not that young."

"I need to know…why. Why Christianity?"

She brushed a strand of hair from her pretty face. "It bothers you, doesn't it? The same way Brother Mike bothers you. That someone you might consider highly intelligent could choose to believe in something unprovable and – in your eyes at least - insane." She looked away. "I was very much in love with someone once who was a Christian. He convinced me that it was a force for good. That it was what had always been missing in my life."

It was an answer – and no answer at all. The cult of personality – even Mike Nealy's persuasive force - couldn't explain it all. _You have an anomaly in your brain_, he wanted to say. Instead he said, "Your Brother Mike's a lug nut." From the shallow rim of the lake ducks took off in a V heading south. He bunched the collar of his coat against the cold. "I think I like the guy."

****

Wilson's mouth hung open. The clang of trays and doctors not enjoying their lunch filled the space around them.

"Close your trap before the cafeteria flies get in."

"And you've been carrying this around with you for – what? – a week?"

"No, actually I passed it on in Kendall Park on Saturday. And you wouldn't believe –"

"Do you even _realize_ how dangerous that was? And I don't mean CA arresting you and torturing you if they find out – that's no less than you deserve, I'd pass them the cattle-prod myself. I mean, _trusting_ these people. You and – and- and _trust_? Since when?" Wilson was sputtering. He used the opportunity to remove half the reuben from the oncologist's plate. "It makes you a collaborator, House. I mean, what if they blow up New York next week on specific orders of their boss?"

"Keep your voice down, dammit."

"What if CA saw you in the park? What if they beat it out of Nealy tomorrow?" Behind Wilson he saw his fellows enter the cafeteria and start toward him, their disagreement on whether their latest patient had lupus – Foreman for, Cameron against – apparently not keeping them in the lab long enough to give him the space he needed. "No, wait –" The oncologist's voice was veering off into Wilson gaga land. "What if – just what if – CA set Nealy up to give you this message to entrap you?"

"What sense would that make? I'm a nobody to them. I put the 'a' in apolitical."

"But you would lead them to the others."

"In which case my contact and I would have been arrested the moment I handed the paper over, probably along with every jogger and duck within a mile." His fellows were almost upon them. "Look, there's something I haven't told you –"

"Or maybe that was a test run. I'd bet my pocket protector Nealy asks for you again. A second message -"

Cameron stopped with Foreman just behind her, her gaze shifting between them. Either she had heard or she hadn't. Wilson studied him, with eyes that reminded him suddenly of Ailyn McCullough's. Seeing more than he wanted to reveal. Secrets could wait, he realized. There was plenty of time to initiate Wilson into the further twists in the bitching mess he'd gotten himself into. He leaned back and took the lab report Foreman proffered.

"So – was it lupus?"

****

(A/N: This chap explains a little more of the AU, I hope. I wanted to keep it moving and not get all long-winded on the details, plus I'll admit I haven't thought it all out down to level x anyway. So apologies if it's still confusing, but please be patient. All will be explained. I think.)

****


	3. Can't Get Off This Ride

3. Can't Get Off this Ride

He wasn't used to being watched. People ignored him until they needed him. As he stood in the lobby signing out on Thursday, he heard the receptionist say his name into the phone and he stopped to listen. "Dr. House? Yes, he's a very good doctor. Yes. No." She glanced at him. "I believe so." He mouthed _Don't be so sure_. "If you think your mother has a medical problem you can bring her in to our clinic. I can't promise Dr. House would see her. His clinic hours?" She rattled them off from a list and hung up. "Someone's very interested in your daily whereabouts," she informed him. "A woman."

Cuddy had come up behind them. "I hope you told her the clinic hours Dr. House is listed for have no basis in reality. Maybe he has a new girlfriend who feels the need to check up on him." At his how-dumb-is-that look she shrugged. "I _know_ – it's the police." She drew him away from the wide-eyed receptionist and lowered her voice. "Just what problem do you have with CA, House?"

"They've discovered my cane is a nuclear device."

"Is all this investigation of you going to cause trouble for my hospital?"

"Only if the cane goes off."

On Friday evening he parked the bike in front of his apartment and leaned for a moment on the handrail that led up the steps to the door, rolling the bottle of Vicodin between his fingers, studying the label as though he had never seen it before. Contemplating his next move. The smoky scent of autumn choked the air, chimneys lit somewhere. It was the same choking sensation he felt inside. The memory of Nealy and the burns on his chest that wouldn't get out of his head. Detective McCullough's eyes, frightening and fascinating in turns. A breeze made him tug his coat tighter and helped him decide.

He toed his way back down the steps, ignoring the pain that had seemed to double in the past week, and crossed the street to the dark-blue Escort parked there. The tinted window on the driver's side rolled down as he approached.

"Look," he told her and then didn't know what to say. _We've got to stop meeting like this_ sounded trite. "We've got to stop meeting like this." McCullough wore a sheepskin jacket, the collar pulled up to frame her face in delicate shadow, her blond hair in a thick braid again. Styrofoam cups littered the dash. The smell of cold coffee from inside the car mingled with something sweeter, her natural scent perhaps or a subtle perfume. She didn't seem alarmed in the least that he had spotted her. "I know I'm fascinating and all, just the eighth wonder of the world, but I'm not going to lead you people to any terrorists."

"You shook off my driver on Saturday." She sounded vaguely bored. He leaned closer into the window and her hand came up, almost a reflex to ward him off, then rested on the door. "Why, Dr. House? Where did you go?"

"I wanted to expose myself to six-year olds in the park, my usual Saturday routine, without you guys interfering."

It eeked a smile from her. "You should have just said. Sexual perverts are Vice's problem."

"I didn't do anything on Saturday you wouldn't have approved of, Adolf."

"By your logic, that means I can drive away now because you really _really_ promise not to go anywhere else tonight."

The thought that she might drive away depressed him. Another gray-on-gray evening spent with his piano seemed suddenly worse than any threat of torture. "Actually I'm nipping around the corner for a drink. Why don't you come with me?"

Her look was indecipherable. Surprise, well-hidden. "You have got to be kidding."

"No, really. I'm not doing anything tonight –"

"When you're right, you're right."

"Consorting with the enemy has a long tradition. If you want to find out more about me, plying me with drink's about the best route you can go. Plus the lack of Styrofoam in your car other than coffee cups tells me you haven't had dinner." When her eyes were wide they seemed softer. She was still shaking her head slightly in disbelief. "This Korean place around the corner makes kimchi so hot it'll nuke the top of your mouth off."

"You really shouldn't be making references to nukes in your position."

"And you really should stop shining me on."

Her sudden nod – matter-of-fact, as though snap decisions were her modus operandi - shouldn't have made him as happy as it did. "All right. Hop in."

"Leave the car," he told her. "Exercise those jackboots for a change."

On the sidewalk she slowed her pace when it didn't match his limp. As they passed his building he leaned for a second on a dirty white van with _Kemmer Plumbing_ printed on the side, then bunched his fist and banged loudly on it twice. "You peons can take a break," he yelled, then moved to the back of the van and threw open the door. Detective Chase and another man with headphones connected to an impressive console of eavesdropping equipment stared like deer in headlights. McCullough came up behind him, grinning. "Go on," she told them. "Take the night off."

He bit back a comment on the implications of that as they watched the van drive away. "Better be hot," McCullough murmured, and when he glanced at her: "The _food_."

The food didn't let them down. She seemed unfazed by the extra chilis he ordered. He had expected to see a gun holster when she took off her coat, then realized she probably kept her service weapon in the brown-leather handbag slung over the chair. It was his first chance to study her figure outside of a car since she had been in his office. Compact, would have been his word. Small for her line of work, five-five or six, yet exuding an impression of coiled strength, a calmness that came with a great deal of training in any field. A miniature Teutonic. They talked about nothing for a while, graduating only slowly to the somethings, the real reason they were sitting across from each other: how much CA had investigated him, why it was important. He learned they had contacted Stacy to find out what kind of person he was. He swallowed the thick knot of rage that threatened to burst out at that, then chased it with a Vicodin while his dinner date watched. He learned that McCullough was divorced, no mention of why, other than that her ex had not been able to come to terms with her work.

"Hey, _I_ can't come to terms with your work," he told her.

"CA does an important job. You think another attack like Dirty May isn't possible?"

He felt the queasy start of pressure beneath his skin, always the same when he talked about politics, as though his body knew there was no true right and wrong, only shaky ground since the bombings. "I think for the past seventeen years we've been suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Seeing terrorists in every messed-up teenager that joins a Christian sect to meet girls. The sky fell once and now Chicken Little – that's you people – tells us it's just bound to fall again. Orange alerts, red alerts."

"There are reasons for those. Information we've received. The psychos are still out there, even if they're only a tiny group compared to the rest. I know most Christians aren't in it for the violence. The terrorists among them are only…an aberration within the aberration, so to speak." It echoed what Nealy had said to him. "It's those few I'm after. They justify what I do." The intensity in her voice told him she needed to convince him – or perhaps herself – that it was true.

"All I know is we've become regimented. A huge standing security force – I have to go through two checkpoints on my way to work just because the university's nearby. And that's before being felt-up just to get into the hospital. The bureaucracy – so we'll know who's who and who's in possession of what – means I can't hand a patient a urine cup without signing off on three different forms. We became a different country in 1989. Most people are so used to it by now that they've forgotten what it was like before."

"You do know what the Encapsulation of Rights Act is, don't you?"

"I know it gives people like you the power to arrest anyone anywhere without requiring reasonable suspicion. That if you happened not to like the color of my eyes you could haul me in right now."

"Then you have nothing to worry about."

It caught him off guard. She was watching him, holding his gaze. He tried to stop the warmth that spread up from his chest, and looked away. The eatery was not conducive to romance, with its harsh lights and funky deep-fried smells from the kitchen. If that was where she was going at all. The signals she gave off were as changeable as their terrorism alerts.

"Look." He met her gaze, which had flickered back down to cold. "All I'm saying is that if a government wanted a way to keep tabs on its people, exaggerating a terrorist threat would be a no-brainer. That it seems like an awful lot of money and effort just to find that small handful of psychos. Just you keeping tabs on me must cost something, and if you're looking for Christian terrorists I'm not even a lead, I'm a mislead. It doesn't pencil out."

"Have you ever heard of John Galt?"

He gave her a _duh_ look. Aside from Michael Nealy it was the name every halfway conscious person in America associated with Christian violence since the bombings, headlining the news so often only a deaf and blind sea urchin could be unaware of it. The mythical leader of the Christian underground since Nealy's imprisonment. He remembered Nealy talking about his handpicked successors.

"What do you know about Galt?" she asked.

"That he nails kidnapped babies to crosses and regularly dumps LSD in the water supply." Her mouth fell open. "Okay, I'm not stupid. He's supposedly responsible for the bomb threats now and then that never amount to anything –"

"Because we're able to stop them in time."

"-that CA claims to have been on his tail several times and each time he's managed to slip away again." She was silent, not affirming or denying. "Mainly because those arrested from his inner circle prefer to go to prison or even die rather than rat on their beloved leader." He didn't add how much that kind of loyalty made him envious, even if it was misplaced. "That he's rumored to be living in our very midst, a regular family guy somewhere with a double life." Her silence, if possible, deepened. "That he uses the name of a character from an Ayn Rand novel who was an intellectual prig. Now that should really tell you something."

"I guess we just need to check every intellectual prig in the country and we'll have him. No wait, we've already started, with you."

He laid his head in his hands for a second. "Great. It begins with this Nealy wanting me to fix his heart and within a week I'm John Galt. Talk about your fast-track career path."

She laughed, startling him. It was beautiful. "No one thinks you're Galt."

"No, you just think Nealy somehow managed to convert me." From the way she looked down for a moment, smoothing her napkin, he knew he was right.

It was all a bunch of crap. The drinks, the dinner, maybe even the perfume. She was playing him. Being the good observer, keeping him in her sights by tugging at his cock.

"Ever read Freud?" he asked. She looked up at his quiet tone. "'The Aberration of Religion'. He was the first to term these sects that had survived since the Middle Ages an aberration. It was when it first started being viewed as a disease. His argument was you had to be a little insane to hold two contradictory beliefs in your head at one time. On the one hand the world the way it works, cause and effect, visible and provable, and on the other hand believing someone's up there pulling all the strings. Or accepting the fact of evil and then claiming there's a god who loves us, who won't or can't do anything about the bad stuff." She was listening so intently that the room seemed to shrink around them, enclosing them. He realized she was likely well-versed in the history behind those she persecuted. There had to be some way to make it clear to her. He shifted and the pain in his leg awoke. _Yes_. "Look, what I'm trying to say is - I believe in logic above all else. If I had to believe in a god, I'd – I'd go nuts. Someone who's supposed to love us all unconditionally – let's say I believe in that - and look what he does to me." Her eyes, so cold, flicked to his leg and back. She understood. "Five years ago I was going around saving lives, maybe not the nicest person in the world, but then –" (_why was it so hard?_). His voice was a ragged scratch. "Then this being I'm supposed to believe in sends me the worst pain I could ever have imagined and leaves me crippled."

The sounds of the restaurant rushed back in. Their waitress was standing over them, asking if there was anything else. _Yeah_, he wanted to say. _Addiction, a girlfriend that up and left_. His detective was still looking at him, a shadow of a frown on her brow. "I don't think I deserved all that bad stuff," he told her. "If a god did it, then I can't believe in him. I just want you to know that's why I'll never be a Christian." The waitress's eyes grew large and she suddenly remembered a customer at another table.

McCullough looked away, through the glass window where condensation marred her reflection. He had known many poker faces in his life but she beat them hands-down. She finally glanced at her watch and turned to seek the restroom. "I'll be right back, then I have to go." She rose. "Great sob story, by the way."

Alone he stared at his own reflection, softened in the glass by the lines of light and dark. Mushy. A man who thought he could move a woman like Ailyn McCullough by baring his soul. An idiot, made more foolish by perfume. With his thumb he drew a clown face – big nose and a crooked grin – in the thin film of wetness on the window, then rubbed his aching leg and popped another pill.

****

_Don't do this_.

The woman who stared back from the restroom mirror at Ailyn McCullough was a stranger.

She had the same face and nothing hair, but the stranger's cheeks were flushed, something that never happened to her, and the eyes had caught some shadow virus, haunted, blazing light and dark with shame at the knowledge that the woman behind them was falling in love.

At the heat every time she encountered him. As though his body flipped a switch inside her at a certain distance a warmth spread through her every time she came near him, warmth she could only struggle against because spying meant…spying. Not love, not even like. It meant feigning feelings, not feeling them.

It was why the eyes in the mirror, the stranger's eyes, said _Don't do this_. A voice crying danger.

"You're too old for this," she told the stranger and her voice echoing from the tiles startled her. Too old for the games, the intrigues that went with what she had to do. Too old to play at flirting when she really meant it.

She was channelling high-school, that was all. At thirty-five. Infatuation with the school bad boy. The whole giddy act, the force of his personality leaving her alive and tingling as though her body were waking from a long sleep. Feelings she hadn't known since Jeff had packed his vinyl collection and walked out. An act made more difficult by the tightrope walk she had to perform, the need to be stand-offish with him – the her on this side of the mirror, the real one who never let her guard down because she had too many secrets to keep – and the come-hither game she was supposed to be playing with him. What had she said? _Then you have nothing to worry about. _Stupid.

And yet his eyes had gone the soft of a child, if only for a second, so hungry for affection it hurt to look at.

Too many secrets.

She washed the stranger's hands, straightened the stranger's blouse, took a deep breath, and stepped back out to find him mellowed, the pills that were apparently more of a crutch to him than his cane having done their chemical best. When he smiled, his eyes slid away from her. She paid, saying CA would pick up the bill, and they walked back to his street in silence.

He paused on the doorstep. "So I still haven't seen your jackboot collection." His hand lay near hers on the iron railing. "Maybe you could arrest me now for possession, Detective McCullough, just get it all over with." He rattled the Vicodin bottle. His eyes were still doing their high-rope routine. "I have a problem keeping up with prescriptions, see. That whole sob-story thing. I'm sure you could make a case out of it."

"Sorry," she told him. "That's Vice again. You'll have to talk to them." She made a mental note to find out more about the stuff he took, what effect it had, and add it to his file. The thought of work helped distract her.

"You shouldn't have called your dogs off." He gazed down the empty street where the van had been parked and his voice dropped the sarcastic lilt. "Listen, don't spend the night in your car just to watch me. It's going to be cold."

"Good-night, Dr. House."

He took it as the dismissal it was. She watched until he disappeared into the building (the cold deepening when he was out of sight), then headed back toward her car and past it, on around the corner to where an innocuous gray minibus stood parked. Chase opened the back door at her knock and she made herself comfortable on the floor beside their monitoring equipment. "So you read my signal right," she complimented them.

Chase shrugged. "Good thing you insisted we have a back-up van. You think he made us in this one?"

"Not a chance." They were both watching her. "It was a nice dinner."

Charlie Dalton grinned. "So – you got some kind of orders from on high to go at this guy, or what?"

"Better me than you." She leaned her head back against the wall and stared into space. "I learned a lot. He's bitter, lonely, a cripple in pain. A man who's never come to terms with his disability." They were silent, listening. "Emphasis on the lonely." Outside the small tinted window she could see the heads of a couple passing, unaware of them only feet away in the dark van. She made sure her voice was in control before speaking. "I don't think any woman's been nice to him in a very long time. I pretended to flirt - complimented his eyes - and he practically had an orgasm." Charlie snorted.

"And that makes him susceptible to Christianity." Chase's voice held its usual self-assurance.

"I'm – not sure about that anymore."

"It's what you said yourself. That it sounded like Nealy turned him. That the fucker's got some kind of power to do that."

She felt dreamy, out of it, and yet aware that they were listening intently. She was the team head, the mom with the big guns; they relied on her experience. "You think it's pain and sorrow that drive all these people to Christianity?" she murmured.

"I've not got the faintest idea."

"We may drop the surveillance," she told him. Chase frowned. "House is not a lead."

"But you said –"

" -not anymore than that cute little member of his medical team you had coffee with. What's her name? Allison Cameron?"

Charlie was snorting again.

Chase turned red. "I was supposed to pump her for information on House, wasn't I?"

"You were supposed to ask her a few questions, not start dating her."

"She's – nice."

"Means hot," Charlie sniggered.

"We went for coffee."

"You disappeared for three hours." Chase looked so abashed that she stretched out her leg to nudge his foot with her own. "Hey, I'm not criticizing, Robert." _I'm misdirecting_. She stood and opened the door to leave. "I'm just saying we need to concentrate on more vital things. They're out there, they're planning another attack. And I want to stop them." She glanced at the directional mike they had set up. "Keep an eye on House for tonight. We'll talk about it in the morning."

And she would think about it in the morning, when she was herself again and not the stranger. Sleep – that legal substance she had been getting too little of – would rewrite her thoughts and she would wake up knowing Gregory House for the ass he was, the embittered and pitiable cripple she had just described to them, not even close to romantically viable. Not the force that plucked at her thoughts, face and eyes and voice refusing to leave her head, turning her into a wire thrumming for the moment she would see him again. A good night's sleep and she would be herself again. She hoped.

****

"_The dinner was…insightful."_

"_Another odd word." Pause. "You're having reservations, aren't you? No pun intended."_

_Shrug. "It's just…well, now that I've really talked to him - I don't believe he's the kind Christianity could have a hold on." Pause. "Go on. Say something. Anything."_

"_If you want to back out, it won't be a problem."_

"_No."_

"_That was fast." Silence. "I see."_

"_What do you see?"_

****


	4. All the People Who Were Doing Wrong

4. All the People Who Were Doing Wrong

And so he was all over the place, feelings that were usually as tight and controlled as a pill rolled between his fingers all scattered, diffuse, leapfrogging from irritability with his fellows (as if that were anything new) to a sort of maudlin unease that drove him to sit in Wilson's office flipping paperclips at the wastebasket while the oncologist tried to work or gave up to give him his best spit-it-out-but-make-it-fast look. Which never got them anywhere. Long silences across the eventually paperclipless desk. Soul-searching without the searching and – for all he knew – without the soul. An old religious concept anyway, the soul, so embedded in daily speech no one gave it a second thought. He talked about Cuddy and then his bike. Wilson replied helpfully in the form of exasperated sighs. He didn't know how to talk about what he wanted to talk about. Michael Nealy, Ailyn McCullough and her eyes, a Saturday morning in the park. He mentioned how often he had noted Detective Chase wandering the outback of the hospital and in particular leaving of an evening with a certain female fellow of his. It made Wilson look up from his charts with the first real frown he had brought to the conversation. "You think they're…?" He made a vaguely hydraulic gesture.

"Judging by how often she was late to work last week, I'd say she's on Australian time. Makes you throw up a little bit in your mouth, doesn't it?"

The oncologist looked away, studying the muggy day beyond the window without seeing it. "And you think he's only getting close to her to keep an eye on you, am I right?" It was what he liked about Wilson, that ability to go from hassled to being on the same wavelength with him in the blink of an eye.

"There's a possibility."

"Cameron's too thin-skinned to stand that kind of intrigue. If that's what it is. She'll get her heart broken." Wilson's tone sounded more worried than the thought of Cameron in cardial stress seemed to warrant. "You really think this Chase – and CA - is capable of that, just to draw a bead on you?"

He helped him study the gray clouds outside. "It would be going to extremes, wouldn't it?" His fingers sought a paperclip and found empty desk. "Maybe the guy just likes her brand of doctor games."

Wilson leveled his gaze on him, another watcher amid all the watching already going on, a circle of watchers in fact, himself watching Cameron who watched Detective Chase apparently like someone who couldn't keep from slotting in that really good porn flick one more time, Chase screwing her maybe just to watch him, and McCullough in there somewhere. "You shouldn't have delivered that message," Wilson summed it up.

He couldn't take any of it seriously. A news item made the evening headlines, a journalist who had written a critical story on CA interrogation (the methods of which, in the journalist's view, relied a little too heavily on alternating current) and had been arrested for obstruction of justice. It was where they were seven years into the twenty-first century. He told himself he should take it seriously.

He waited two days. A conference with the whiteboard one late afternoon, the catatonic patient off in IC somewhere, with every sign of diabetes except the diabetes, and which should have been vastly interesting, yet his mind plowed through it like peanut butter, gummed and slow-moving until Cameron stood and said she had to leave early. He stared along with Foreman.

"Tell me something," he asked her, capping the marker. It was time. "Who gets to be down under?"

She blushed, always pretty, then managed a smile. "Let's just say, when we have winter they have summer. And vice-versa." She tightened the belt on her coat.

"Getting in bed with Christian Affairs is the dumbest idea you've ever had, you know." It made her turn at the door, her face narrowed as it always did against his rants. "And that's in a stellar line-up of dumb ideas."

"I'm not getting in bed with Christian Affairs," she told him - told them both, taking in Foreman with a glance. "I'm getting in bed with Robert Chase." Which confirmed it. The pivot of her gaze was back on him. "And I'm not going to stop just because you think this is all about you."

He shouted "Dumb!" after her as the door banged behind her, all out of sarcasms, only the rude left, and Foreman hissed at him. The black man shuffled a stack of papers into order with a case-solved gesture. "Let her be, House. He's not seeing her to get to you."

"You are badly out of the loop."

"You can't tell me CA really thinks you're a Christian just because Nealy asked to be checked by you. The connection was always tenuous at best."

"Like your grasp of neurology."

Losing money would distract him, he decided. He hit the off-track parlor in the evening, the noise of desperate people acting like a buffer against the pain in his thigh. Turning from the screen after losing a cool hundred, he saw the back of a woman's head across the room, a long blond braid, the right height and build, and his heart did a little mamba number. The woman turned. It wasn't McCullough.

_Get a hold of yourself_. He thought he knew how. He forgot about betting, got hold of his phone once he was home and punched in the number he knew by heart. Well-built they must have taken to mean hefty. The broad ass the hooker settled onto his bed half an hour later was well into the steatopygiac, genetically impossible with her pale freckled skin and Irish orange hair. As far from the Ailyn McCullough type as he could imagine. "What would you like me to do?" she simpered.

He felt the pull, his skin aching for the rub of flesh against it, any flesh, his hands already on her tits, the rush of sadness – always the same - so strong now it made his throat constrict, the thought that he had to turn to a stranger for this. He tried to block out her face mentally without closing his eyes. His voice barely worked. "I want you to say 'You're under arrest, Dr. House'."

After the initial surprise she was very good.

A week later Cameron appeared in his office, slipping in so quietly as he absorbed a text on Diamond-Blackfan anemia with his feet propped on the desk that he only looked up to find her there when the chair creaked. It was nine p.m.

"Lover on kangaroo duty tonight?" he asked.

"A case he's working on. They do have real cases now and then, you know. Tracking down real terrorists." The glow she had worn for weeks stood out in the low lamp light. "They got a new boss a few months ago, Robert said, who likes to get things done. He pushes them. It's why they hoped you'd come back with some confession when you went up to Kearney."

"This boss was why McCullough was all over me, I guess."

"Was she?" He wondered if her interest was feigned. "All over you?"

He hadn't seen his teutonic detective – or any surveillance - in two weeks. They'd gotten subtle or they'd given up. "Let's say we weren't in the same league as you and Chase." He studied her, letting his real fears rise into his throat just enough to give a useful levity to his voice. "You're really in love with him, aren't you?"

"We're…alike. No matter how impossible that sounds to you. From the moment we met something clicked. Hasn't that ever happened to you?"

He shrugged. "Paintball."

She frowned, then let it go. "And he loves me. We're insanely in love."

"Five weeks. No one's insanely in love after only five weeks."

"Him coming into my life has changed everything for me –"

"Five weeks."

" – and I think I could change everything for him."

"Five – " He broke off, realizing what she meant. "No." His voice took on a true levity. "No. You're a fool. _He's CA_."

He had dropped his heels off the desk, holding his thigh to do so, and leaned in toward her. Her glow was maddening. "You can't have love without trust," she told him.

"But you can have great sex without trust!" His voice was large. It didn't startle her. "Keep doing that for all anyone cares – screw him until your head pops off – but _don't start trusting him_."

"Robert loves me. Don't you think I'd know if a man were just playing me for some ulterior motive? Do you think I'm that stupid, Dr. House?"

The energy left him. Because the answer was no. She was smart. "Look. I'm just saying –" What was he saying? "It's dangerous. If I were you, I wouldn't see him again. Find some excuse to break it off while it's still early enough." _If I were you_. He wasn't sure that was true. Would he have resisted Ailyn McCullough if she had played a more forceful game? Or if she decided to come around again?

"You wouldn't play it safe either. You're a risk-taker."

"Not emotionally." It was more than he usually revealed about himself. He saw her eyes narrow in acknowledgement. And it was the answer to his question. Sex, yes - he would have slept with McCullough (the curve of calves that had plagued his dreams for weeks, the heat-thought of her body against his), but his feelings he would have kept hermetically sealed because it was what he always did.

"Robert and I've come a long way in five weeks." She sounded adamantly at peace, that soft brick-wall he'd beaten his head against before. "I know that what he feels for me is real. He had a hard life, his mother was an alcoholic –"

He made his best sad-violin sound.

"And he says I make him happy. I believe it. I can see it. He's so happy with me sometimes he gets like a little boy."

"Sometimes?" Sarcasm had no effect on the wall. Either she was very naive or wiser in giving herself up to life than he could ever hope to be. She was standing, glancing at her watch. "He should be finishing up now," she muttered, then looked straight at him. "You know I'll do what I want to do. You can't stop me." He knew it. A sudden nostalgia struck him, the triangulation of their bodies, the dark conference room beyond that wrapped them in friendly-hostile intimacy. The way she smoothed a strand of hair behind one ear. Scenes lived so many times they had seeped into his bones, like a drug, threatening now to change. Dumb really because what should he care. "Look," he said. She turned back at the door. "Allison." Her eyes grew wide. "If you need help – and I think you will if you do what you're planning– then promise you'll come to me." Eyes so large and round now they looked like car headlights. "I'm good at getting out of trouble – of course only because I'm good at getting into trouble in the first place – but I'd probably have some idea how to get you out of the mess you're headed for." Her mouth joined her eyes in an O of disbelief. "And, please, get your chin off the floor. Just - pretend we've stepped into an alternate universe where I'm a kind and caring person. That nice boss you can always go to for help." The darkness around them waited. "Tell me you'll depend on me when the time comes. This is too serious not to."

She stared for a moment longer. "I will, Dr. House. Thank you." Then gave him a smile, the image of peace again. "But I won't need it."

Alone again in his office he drank a finger of nostalgia from the bottle he kept in the desk and thought about relationships. The presence of others, day in day out, their surprising depths and heights (yes, even the short ones) that etched itself into your brain until you woke up one day and knew you had a responsibility toward them. Cameron would need a plan if he was going to help her, and plans were his speciality.

He would devise a plan.

****

The call came directly from the doctors at Kearney.

"_Yes!_" Wilson, in his office involuntarily sharing his three-taco lunch with him, slapped the cluttered desk with his palm. "I _told_ you Nealy'd ask for you again."

"He's in the infirmary, is all they said. In 'bad shape'. Don't you hate it when they use medical jargon like that? I'm going to have to look that one up."

"It's entrapment, I'm telling you."

"Think he'll try to pass me a message through his IV tube? Or maybe he's catheterized. Urine bag's the way to go when it comes to secret messages, I always say."

"Don't go up there again." Wilson's glee at being right had dissolved. His hands on the hot-sauce were still, waiting.

"But it's just starting to get fun."

That watching again. Wilson's eyes held shadows he couldn't place. Not worry as much as – no, he couldn't say what it was. Curiosity was the wrong word. A pondering, the physician's hard-lipped perusal of that X-ray that told him more than he let on. "Don't get more involved in it than you are, House."

"I'm up to my subscapular glands in this thing already."

"You made one mistake in delivering that message. Don't do it again. Two wrongs don't make a right."

"But three rights make a left. Now, how does this taco thing work - one for you, two for me?"

Kearney Prison seemed more deserted than it had been the last time. He was directed to an outlying building that housed the infirmary. The guard who checked him and led him down the hall was happy to answer his questions about Nealy. "The guy fainted while he was taking a leak and he hit his head on the tiles."

"Micturition syncope. Interesting."

The guard looked at him as though he suspected he'd spoken Hungarian. "The concussion put him in the infirmary, then his heart starts doing its wacko thing. You'll have to ask the doctor the rest."

Dr. Davies was the one he had spoken to on the phone. She was hard-looking with wiry hair and limbs, too old in a scary job she obviously hated. She discussed Nealy's chart with him for a moment, the myocarditis signs like a red flag throughout, then left him alone with the figure on the bed, whose eyes above the oxygen mask wandered to him then closed in what might have been a smile. Nealy's head was clumsily bandaged. He looked years older.

"I see you're getting the best care."

The terrorist's hand came up and removed the oxygen mask.

"You're in A-fib," he reminded him. "That air is your friend."

"There are things I need to tell you." The voice hurt to listen to.

"Possibly the only friend you have right now."

Nealy's head-shake dislodged gasps. He took a breath from the mask. "I'm so sick they haven't even insisted on my little gold therapist this morning." On the tray beside the bed he indicated the paper cup that held a gold-colored oval pill with the trademark N on it, his anti-theic. "They know and I know. I'm dying."

"It just feels that way because you're close to death." He watched the erratic pulse on the monitor for a moment so he wouldn't have to look at Nealy. "Your heart not pumping right has screwed with your blood pressure. It's what made you dizzy when you peed. I could probably find out what's eaten away your heart wall, but I doubt it would matter. It's too late to do anything about it. Unless you think there's anyone in the continental U.S. who would be willing to give you a heart." His own chest seemed weighted down. "You could act a little more scared, you know."

"Remember-" the _r_'s a gurgle from deep within "– I believe in an afterlife."

"Don't let me keep you then."

The peace in Nealy's weak smile woke the envy in him again. "Is it really that irrational –" he took another mask breath – "to believe in something you can't see, Dr. House?"

"And by definition will never see, because anyone who finds out if it's true or not is dead. Which sort of takes the fun out of it."

"Perhaps an irrational belief is the only thing that can give you strength – when your problems are irrational ones." Nealy's gaze fell to the lump in his visitor's breast pocket that was the bottle of Vicodin.

_No_, he wanted to say, _that's perfectly rational. Unavoidable. A weakness in my brain. I have strong receptors for opioids_. No more a matter of his strength of character than Nealy's gyral misalignment that turned the professor into a mystic. And for the same reason unsolvable.

"I can't accept any strength that doesn't come from myself," he explained to Nealy.

"Which means you will fail." It was a simple statement, from someone ill beyond caring. "They'll beat you." Nealy lifted a weak finger to tap the pills through the pocket. "That rational mind of yours will refuse all help that looks irrational until it's too late, and life will beat you, because no one can be that strong alone." The truth of it hit him like his own personal syncope, the dark he always kept at bay closing in at the sides of his vision. "And from what I know of you, Dr. House, you are more alone than most."

_Alone because you refuse all help_. His own rational mind the barrier. He looked down at his hands on his cane, the dark continuing to rush in like a dye spreading across his sight, the sadness in the thought horrifying, _Yes I'll fail._ He would be the one on the bed some day, having woken up to find his eyes in the mirror turned yellow, spiraling down until he was nothing but a husk waiting for death by acetaminophen-induced liver failure because he could never give himself up to something beyond himself. He suddenly wanted to smash the machines, take his cane and slash out, he could see himself doing it, the rage against Nealy, against fate, a clot in his throat that came from nowhere, he would trash the heart monitor until the sparks flew, rip the man's air tube away, anger unreasoned, the _no_ rising out of him and sticking in his throat. Irrational rage. He tried to swallow it; the lump was too large.

He didn't know if Nealy noticed. For a moment his chest moving matched the prisoner's struggles beneath the mask, as though they breathed together, rage and death tallying, until the lump of tension bled from him and they were silent. In the next room they could hear the doctor speaking to another patient. She would return any second.

"Is this why I'm here?" He sounded tired even to himself. "So you can convince me your god's got the perfect detox program if I'd only check myself in?"

Nealy breathed into his mask for a while longer, then removed it and shook his head. "I have another message for you." House snorted. "Is that funny, Dr. House?"

"This friend of mine bet me it wouldn't stop with the first one."

Nealy's eyes narrowed. "You told someone about –"

"Don't worry. The guy won't be arrested as an accessory. They're only interested in me." He pursed his lips. "Actually you remind me of this friend. Subtract his lame jokes and the ditsy way he lets me manipulate him and he'd sound a lot like you. Always wanting me to see reason. Always based on the same kind of non-reasoning sentimentality. Little life-affirming speeches. Everything so simple if I could just step outside myself."

Nealy's expression was unreadable. "Maybe you should listen to him."

"So where's the message, Professor Life-Affirmer-Who's-Dying?"

The dying man beckoned him closer.

**

The guard at the main door of the infirmary wouldn't let him leave. "You got issues," the guard said. In the cubicle behind him Ailyn McCullough sat perched on a swivel stool. She wore jeans and had hooked one booted foot through the bottom rung in a way that seemed both manly and coquettish. She looked off-duty. He felt that warmth again, like booze rolling down his throat, his skin tingling with anticipation. He hadn't admitted to himself how much he wanted to see her again. She smiled at him around the guard, swiveled once and stood.

"We need to talk, Dr. House."

"Just can't stay away from me, can you?"

"We have reason to believe you're carrying messages for Nealy."

_Oops_.

"Come in here, please." She was holding a door open to a small room behind the cubicle. The guard had disappeared. He followed her in. Aside from a low table along one wall, the room was empty. She closed the door.

"Jackboot time at last?"

"Take your clothes off."

The warmth had turned cold. She was actually pulling latex gloves from a drawer in the table. "You have got to be kidding."

"I'm not a big kidder."

"I'm a visitor leaving a prison, not a detainee. You can't –"

"I believe we talked about this. I can do anything I want. Take all your clothes off and lay them here on the table."

"I'm at least entitled to have a man do this -"

"Show me the law and I'll gladly follow it, Dr. House. In this case, there isn't one." She sounded almost cheerful, leaning with one hip against the table, yet her body was stiff, he had just enough mind left over from dismay to notice, the gloves she wasn't putting on yet crushed to a ball in one fist. Her eyes, hard as blue jewels, never left him. "I'm waiting."

He took his shirt off, roughly, fingers anesthetized, and shoved it to her down the table. She barely lifted it. His pulse wouldn't stop pounding in his head. And if she were a doctor it wouldn't have been, even a sexy doctor, Cameron or Cuddy - bodies were bodies in the world he occupied - but she wasn't one of them. She was a boss lady in a way Cuddy could never be, a woman who had rattled his thoughts since he first met her, reason enough to make his fingers fumbly, plus the body she was about to see wasn't just any body – it came with a viewer-discretion-advised warning. A fact she might not be aware of.

"All of your clothes, Dr. House."

Almost impossible without a chair to sit on, though he managed to kick the shoes off, then he was fumbling with his belt. "You know I'm a doctor, if you recall – I could do this to myself." His voice sounded breathy, an idiot's growl as shaky as his balance half-perched on the table, the logistics of undressing when you can't stand on one leg. He took his time pulling down his pants, and shorts (_don't make her say it again_), every hop and yank necessarily clownish, but he wouldn't turn red, there were ways not to let that happen, like biting down on your tongue until it hurt, and then his clothes were off, nothing on except his socks. An old joke crossed his mind, _Real men don't take their socks off last_, but then he hadn't been a real man for a while.

He turned aside to lean against the table so she could see how large it was.

The scar's presence was as if someone had entered the room with them. The shockingly ugly guest they would now pretend to ignore. It had a heft of its own. From the stillness of her breath he could tell she was looking at it, though he kept his eyes on the opposite wall. It was always like this, with hookers, with other doctors. The moment he first stood in front of someone, exposed, proffering this inside look at himself like a child holding out some shameful item, a stick of gum stolen from a store –_here it is, stare now, gasp_ - the definition of everything bad and ugly in him, while they looked on and shook their heads. That patch of skin suddenly become the essence of all he was, and didn't want to be. He could have yelled _This isn't me_, always longed to, but it would only prove that it was.

The silence went on so long he had to look across at her. He knew every expression he might have expected, from pity to studied self-control, but hers was none of those. Her eyes, non-judgmental, roamed the scar as though she needed to memorize it, her poker-face again, though there was something of desire, he told himself, in the way it lingered on his upper body as it moved up to meet his gaze.

He had had entire conversations with looks before. Mostly with Wilson. With a little start he realized that was what her eyes reminded him of now, that look his only friend wore at times, a steady gaze that said it knew him, knew how sad things could be, tinged by the faintest hint of – _fun_, but not at his expense, a look it made him dizzy to seek a word for as he stood with her there in silence, because the only one that fit was – camaraderie. A friend's soft look that said _We had to get that behind us_. His detective-lady-enemy-friend. The last part of which made no sense at all.

Her hand on the bunched-up gloves hadn't moved.

He sighed. "Don't tell me I really do have to do this to myself." His voice no longer shook.

"Get dressed," she said.

"_What?_"

"You can get dressed again."

"What the –" He was sputtering. "What was this all about? Aren't you going to – drill for oil?" He indicated the gloves.

"I never was. I just wanted to know what you looked like with your clothes off." His mouth fell open. "You can put them back on now, Dr. House."

_Gotcha_.

She shrugged, that little non-smile still tugging at her lips, then left, dropping the gloves in the waste-basket at the door as she went.

Yes, you could have entire conversations in looks. Questions asked and answered.

He wondered what he had been saying to her with his look. He suddenly felt like laughing.

**

"_When I was four I left my Barbie doll on the kitchen counter one day beside the hot tea kettle and when I came back the leg had started to melt where it touched the kettle. Like a bite taken out, all twisted and rippled. That's what it looked like."_

"_You feel you had no right to do what you did to him?"_

"_I've never done anything remotely like that."_

"_Your job –"_

"_I said to him, 'I can do anything I want'. But that's not true. I'm restrained in what I do. In a lot of ways. You know that."_

"_But so it bothers you that you – what? – abused the power you have? Abuse of power's sort of CA's motto, isn't it?"_

"_But not mine."_

"_We could still call the whole thing off. Whoa, don't look at me like that."_

"_The thing that bothers me is the why. It was like a compulsion. Driving up to Kearney when I knew he'd be there. Planning it. Like something pulling at me. He started to laugh, you know, after I'd walked out."_

"…_?"_

"_A real laugh. Which, to tell you the truth, I didn't know he was capable of." Pause. "I think the reason I had to see it – to see him like that – was because it makes us more even. It helps to know he's broken like me."_

"_So now he's shown you his but you haven't shown him yours." _

"_I loved that doll after that, more than any of the others. It had been through something."_

****

End of Chapter 4

(Reviews welcome. With Christmas, the chapter rate's going to slooow down (even though they don't have Christmas in Aberrant) , so the next probably won't be until the new year. Happy holidays!


	5. Blood at the Root

5. Blood at the Root

_Hole up on your days off._

It was his maxim, a mechanism against the on and off of life that would one day kill him. He could fill up on emptiness when he was alone, wrap the silence of his apartment around him like a blanket infected with bitterness until it infused his skin, a barrier against the emptiness he felt when he was back at work with others. Always alone by choice meant he didn't have to ponder why he never connected with anyone. McCullough crossed his mind so often he thought his brain must look like an ant farm. He longed to tell her she was tough, and see if her eyes lit up. At night he dreamed of violent sex, waking with the brush of handcuffs still alive on his wrists, delicately brutal images fading fast, his erection throbbing. Not his cup of come, so to speak, and never had been; even awake, the fading images left him cold. It seemed only in dreams that he was another man.

One who might have gone after her, not waiting for her whack-a-mole appearances in his life, if it wouldn't have meant walking into the inviting white CA building over in Trenton and asking for her. Nealy's second message was the other thing that crawled through his head, no note this time, just the voice with its entreaty whispered between breaths from the oxygen mask, the theory that was no theory but only a dying theist's conspiracy fantasy. He followed it up anyway, to keep himself occupied, combing the Internet for data on the origins of Norxylam until that avenue petered out. The university had microfiche going back to the sixties. The librarian, a stunningly beautiful black woman of perhaps sixty, looked from him to his ID. He hadn't shaved in five days. The bottle of pills he rattled while he worked bothered the guy in the next seat until the librarian came and told him to stop. When he was finished – all the knowledge anyone needed right there - he leaned his forehead on the edge of the desk so long, eyes closed, that she had to come again and ask him if he was all right.

The world shrank to the small round opening in the bottle. Wilson wrote him an extra scrip without asking, all big dark eyes and lips pursed so as not to explode with asking. It was a way to keep the storm at bay, the faces that talked at him, demanding, and which ate away at the time he needed to think things through. A pill, and then another, and the storm faded to a lightning flash at the edge of his vision, so far away it seemed the thunder would never come. But come it did.

He blew in late on a Thursday, the first snow of the season having snarled traffic, and saw the receptionist's eyes track away as he signed in. She was looking past him, concerned. Vectors lit up, what he had not noticed before abruptly as bright as runway lights, lines connecting – the group of suits at the elevator, three stooges, calmly tense with bulges under their coats, another two men stamped from the same robocop mold entering Cuddy's office at the other end of the lobby while she held the door for them with an alarmed expression. His own alarm burgeoning, heart splitting open to spew acid into his throat. And on the stairs – the lightning flash that woke him – another stooge-fest of three, heading up fast, these in the black uniforms that shouted CA. One was talking into a head-mounted radio. Pistols openly in their hands. Lines of light converging to make him struggle for breath as though he'd been punched in the gut. _This is it_.

"They asked if Dr. Cameron was in," the receptionist muttered. She wasn't looking at him, too caught up in the lobby scene. "I told them she'd just gone up."

Then he had the receptionist's interoffice phone in his hand. His movement spilled her penholder into her lap. He could hear his breath in the receiver. A voice in his head screamed _Pick up, pick up_. One ring was all they had time for. He saw the elevator arrive and the bulge-coated men step in. People who had noticed the uniforms taking the stairs three at a time had clustered now into groups, whispering. She picked up.

He said three words.

And she was smart, no matter how dumb she was in love. A second's pause, and then the phone clunked because she had dropped it and she was gone. He felt the taste of his words still in his mouth.

The men at the elevator turned as they stepped into it, one tapping a finger to an earphone. His eyes met House's, his start of a frown cut off as the doors closed.

Hang up, punch another extension. The second call was even quicker. It was good to have a plan. The receptionist had stood, scattering pens and dirty looks at him as she did, giving no thought– as far as he could tell – to why he'd needed her phone so quickly, and moved away to add her whispers to one of the whispering groups. The two men who had entered Cuddy's office were coming back out. They looked straight through him as he put the receiver down casually, but his boss following behind them caught his eye. She looked devastated. As they passed him, headed toward the elevator, he pretended to look for some lost item in his pockets, pulling them wide open, big gestures that kept his face averted, practically sticking his head down in there, just the oblivious cripple here, and Cuddy grimaced at him behind their backs as she went by. He thought she had tears in her eyes. She mouthed _Cameron_ and then a U-shape he read as _You knew_. He turned and started to walk away, got halfway around the corner before he heard her stage-whisper, the CA men apparently far enough ahead to be out of earshot. "_House!_" Tears in the voice too.

He quickened his hobble and disappeared around the corner.

**

"You knew."

He had waited an hour before going up to his office, to stand amid the files and junk strewn across every available surface. They had ransacked the room. He could tell because his guitar was out of place. The detective who had caught his eye in the elevator had come back in from the conference room where he was questioning a shell-shocked Foreman and had made him unlock the bottom drawer to his desk and then shuffled through the special files hidden there, his CA lips so thin they might have been a line drawn on his face. "What are these?" "Medical files. Don't worry about them – the people are dead." The man waited like a dormant volcano. "They're – cases I couldn't solve, okay? The patients died, see, and the anal, obsessive doctor keeps a record of it in case he ever confronts it again. One of those he-can't-handle-defeat things." After that he had taken his place in the conference-room seat vacated by Foreman and answered the man's unimaginative questions about Cameron for half an hour while uniformed men looked in at regular intervals to shake their heads and shrug. He pretended not to know what that meant. He sat now with Cuddy in the silence after the goons had given up searching the hospital and left.

"You _knew_," she repeated. She was working herself into a scowling lather. "Knew Cameron was a Christian, that she was sick and needed help, and you did nothing, House."

"Who says?"

She stared for a moment then let the implication slide. "You must have known. She worked for you. Either she confided in you –"

"Oh, now I'm a people person? Do I _look_ like a people person to you? Everyone around me just drawn to sit across from me in that chair and pour their heart out because people people are like that, they're great listeners and – "

"Oh _shut_ up." She glared. She had dried her eyes, back to hard-shelled. "You know about people before they open their mouth. You would have guessed about Cameron."

"Yes, I should have guessed something as wild as that and I'll be beating myself up about it for a long time –"

"Unless CA does it for you –"

"- but who would have thought? Sort of creepy, isn't it? It's like these Christians are just _everywhere_. You could be one, Wilson could be." He was rambling. Below the table his hands on his cane were still shaking. He wanted Wilson, wanted his bland, into-the-distance stare, some inane comment that would put a perspective on the image he couldn't erase of the black uniforms bounding up the stairs. The oncologist was at Princeton Surgical all morning on a special consult, Cuddy had told him when he asked offhandedly, something Wilson hadn't mentioned to him. He tightened his hands on his cane to stop the trembling.

Cuddy was still following her thought. "It would have been obvious to you something was wrong with Cameron and you would have tricked her into revealing herself."

"Things are always so obvious in hindsight, aren't they? Like the size of your ass. Which I would love to see leaving my office right now. I have some cleaning up to do." He paused in consideration. "Not a phrase you hear from me every day."

Cuddy studied him, the suspicion back in the gesture with which she played with her necklace. "At least she got away."

He tutted. "That's hangin' talk there, pardner."

After she left Foreman came to lean in the doorway. "A department of two," he noted.

"Did you know, Cuddy was going to let me hire three fellows way back when? I never did because I couldn't find anyone who would irritate you and Cameron enough to make it fun."

"Do you think her Detective Chase was responsible for this?" Foreman mused. House had tried not to think about what it meant that neither Chase nor McCullough had accompanied the raid. Foreman seemed puzzled. "Cameron got too close to him, I suppose. Betrayed herself in some way."

"I think she confessed to him outright." Foreman stared at him. "I think she decided they were so in love that she had to be completely open with him. Dissect me and pin me to the tray. Maybe last night, they're sitting on the couch or even in bed, just pillow-talk, and it turns into pillow verbal diarrhea because she gets the urge to finally go all the way, psyche-wise, let him know who she really is, and after the initial shock he takes all night to decide what to do about it. Which you have to give him credit for not handcuffing her to the bedpost immediately. That's the way it happened." The stacked nurse Foreman had been hitting on for weeks brushed his shoulder at the door in passing and smiled at him, but it couldn't tear the black man's gaze from his boss. The same suspicion Cuddy had fumbled with darkened his eyes. "I think." House stood, shuddering like a dog to shake off the chill that still lay beneath his skin, and saw that the coffeepot was empty. A department of two. The nostalgia beat at his brain, a snow shadow outside in the cold morning, a slight figure hurrying along a side street, pulling her hood to her face when anyone passed. Or maybe she had made it to friends. Maybe by now they were speeding her in a car to one of their safe-houses. He turned back to Foreman. "Now you're going to clean up my office," he told his only fellow, who scowled. "That Affirmative Action's got to be good for something."

****

To be tough was to die a little inside. To go numb in the right places so they wouldn't guess she was soft. She stood outside her boss's door, nervous because Blenheim hadn't called in very many detectives for a private conversation in the three months he had run the division. It would be about Gregory House, and some organ inside her trembled at the thought, not her heart, but farther down, a heat of disquiet that settled between her hips. She had to be tougher than every man in the place just to prove herself, to keep all the bruised soft secrets inside her hidden, and that toughness had begun to slip crazily since she'd started the case. Seeing Greg House's body in the Kearney search room had stunned her. His vulnerability – not the leg, for which she had been prepared, or the weakness implicit in it, but rather the shame he clearly felt about it, his fumbling and the way he couldn't look at her at first – it had made him so human she had wanted to cry. It had been oddly familiar until she had realized it was the same toughed-over softness she hid inside herself. And it made the whole idea that she had had backfire – that she could get control of her feelings by bringing him down a notch with a little chicanery. Prove her power over him. Instead, his power over her had been confirmed. She hadn't planned on melting the way she did. It had frightened her.

It still frightened her. She took a breath to stop the trembling, grasped the doorknob as hard as she could and strode into Blenheim's office.

Charles ("Chuck") Blenheim's name-plate read _Charles ("Chuck") Blenheim_. Only an ass would put his nickname on his name-plate, she had decided when he first came to head the division, and she had not been proven wrong. Blenheim's face looked like someone had trash-compacted his head, features squashed from top to bottom, with parts that didn't fit forced outward – dumbo ears, a protruding lower lip that gave him a petulant baby-pout. Mashed baby. She figured he had gotten into the tough branch he was in to get away from the thought of what his face made him look like. He was around fifty, still fit, black hair just beginning to flirt with gray, a non-starter in the other positions he had held, who had leapfrogged more deserving men for the post of chief in the New Jersey division by pulling strings, she had heard. He wanted to talk about Gregory House.

"Detective McCullough, you're going soft."

_Don't blink_. "I guess I have a soft spot for cripples." A snide tone was the best thing to hide behind. "Cripples with no record of Christian activity whatsoever. Cripples it would be a waste of our time and effort to keep pursuing."

"You pulled this House's surveillance, decided unilaterally he wasn't worth watching. And yet a member of his medical team was a Christian. It's almost certain he carried a message from Nealy to her. He went back to Nealy a second time."

"I searched him." She couldn't remember whether the Kearney search room had cameras. Her palms against the arms of the chair felt cold.

"Do you know why you were not informed of Allison Cameron's arrest until after the fact, Detective McCullough?" When Chuck Blenheim asked a question his voice went high, a baby whine, with a deadness behind it that made her certain he could be very cruel. He had been part of a secret render team, she remembered, before coming to them. Probably had a taste for cruelty.

He leaned forward now for emphasis, the pretender's gesture of authority. "Detective Chase came to me, McCullough – not to you, his senior partner – to me, to tell me this Allison Cameron had confessed to him. He needed advice. Most people in our line of work are going to discover, at some point, that an acquaintance – even a close acquaintance – has latent theist tendencies. Chase is young, it had never happened to him. But he didn't go to you. And do you know why?" The baby whine again. She felt cold all over. "Because he didn't trust you not to go to Gregory House with it." Blenheim was trained in observation; if she even swallowed now he would notice. "The same reason you were left out of the loop once we agreed to arrest Cameron." _Agreed?_ "If you'd let it slip to House –"

"Robert didn't _want_ to have her arrested." The question – a statement of fact - fell out of her before she could stop it. It was something she had wondered about. She had known her partner was sleeping with Allison Cameron the last few weeks, and from the way he had spoken he had sounded in love. Now things clicked into place. "It was you. You ordered Chase to have her arrested."

Blenheim's eyes narrowed. "I gave no orders. I convinced him. After we discussed it, Detective Chase saw it my way."

She hadn't spoken to her partner in two days. He came to you for advice, she knew she couldn't say aloud, and you pushed his fanatic buttons. She liked Robert Chase, even if he saw things too black and white. It was still an honest reaction. Whereas the falsity flickering behind Blenheim's beady baby eyes chilled her.

"Detective Chase came to see that the woman needed help, that it would be best for her if we brought her in," Blenheim continued. "And there's exactly one reason she's not in custody now –" _Here it comes_. "Gregory House."

"Just because she worked for him doesn't –"

"House helped Cameron escape. There's evidence."

"Dr. House is the ultimate atheist. I don't think –"

"Are you asked to think?" Voice in the stratosphere.

"After I talked to House I decided –"

"Who makes the decisions here?" Baby eyes sharp as pins. "I do."

She looked straight at his ugly face. She was slipping inside again. "Well then, I guess I'd better call you god."

It lit an odd fire behind his eyes. She would be watched now, she knew, bumped to the top of the questionables-list. "Call me god if you want to, Detective McCullough. Because I'm _your_ god. If you like your job." Her baby boss leaned forward again, so far now she could smell his breath, cold coffee and nothing else. "And your god, McCullough, wants you to go out and arrest Dr. House. He's ordering you to."

Tough orders, coming in right and left, and she would follow them because she was a good girl, and because she was tough. Because there was too much to prove and too much to hide. For a moment she saw Greg House's hands, gentle at some small task, opening his pill bottle perhaps, though she couldn't remember where she had seen that, a tenderness in his fingers that his coarse words always belied, and it struck her with the force of a strangler's grip on her throat that she had hoped – longed – for those fingers to touch her the same way one day. The image changed, the hands suddenly clasped behind his head as he was manhandled to the floor, crying out in pain.

A knock sounded on Blenheim's door and his secretary stuck her head in to remind him of a meeting, then withdrew.

"I believe we understand each other, Detective." Blenheim rose, dismissing her, and she made it out the door without another word, conscious every second of his baby eyes on her back.

****

They came while he was performing an angiogram with Foreman in the cath lab. He had just shot dye into the patient, a nervous CPA with apparent Brugada Syndrome, but from the flash of warmth that bathed his own veins at the sight of Ailyn McCullough he might have shot it into himself. She was accompanied by two goons in uniform. Chase wasn't with them. The warmth chilled in half a second when he saw her face.

"Dr. Gregory House, you're under arrest for aiding and abetting a Christian." At her signal one of the men started around the bed toward him.

The patient's eyes grew huge.

House turned back to work the catheter as though she hadn't spoken. "I trust you know you're being irradiated up the bazoo, Detective." The CA man stopped beside him, confused. "You too, big guy. We're not wearing these lead aprons to make a fashion statement."

Foreman turned and switched off the X-ray equipment.

"Turn that back on," he growled at him. "They can wait till I'm finished."

The patient's head was joggling back and forth between them in tennis-match rhythm. Alarm did not begin to describe the CPA's face.

"You're not taking this very seriously," McCullough said.

"Oh, I'm serious, all right. This guy'll die if we don't find out what's wrong with him and then who will do my taxes for me?"

Her stone face frightened him more than he would admit. It had been that way with his dad, the change in expression that said you had ceased to exist as a person, all past acquaintance annulled, that you were reduced now to an object of punishment no amount of pleading could save. He glanced at her, trying not to linger on the eyes, hoping for a sign of the woman who had sat across from him at dinner or the one who had made him strip just because she could, but there was nothing.

The patient whimpered.

He was whimpering himself on the inside, he realized, a fact he was not about to show. The goon beside him had already removed the handcuffs from his belt, waiting for McCullough's go-ahead. _Try reason_. He spoke to her. "Look, I'm being a doctor here. Just let me finish."

"A doctor? I don't see a white coat."

"Still a doctor. Just the way you're still all cop" – he made the two words sound dirty – "even though you're not wearing a Kevlar vest. Which is _very_ obvious."

The tiny flash that came and went in her eyes would have been a blush, he told himself, in any woman less hardened.

"Can't you and your guard dogs just wait outside until I'm through?" he suggested. It was closer to pleading than he had intended. Strident sarcastic pleading, but still pleading. "There's no back door to this room, you know. I won't escape. I suppose once we've killed the patient I could sneak out as the dead body under the sheet, but now that I've said that you'll probably think of it."

As though words were magic, every monitor beeper in the room went off as the patient's heart seized up.

"V-fib!" Foreman was already hurrying to open the man's shirt.

House stared at the patient and sighed. "Never talk dead bodies in front of a high-strung CPA. Crash, in here!"

He had the defibrillator paddles in his hands before the nurses arrived to shove McCullough aside. The goon was still on him, so close he couldn't maneuver, and he held the paddles up near the cop's chest, monster-attack style, as though intent on shocking him. The cop fell back in alarm, giving him room. One shock was all the patient needed. He came back whimpering.

Foreman cleared the response team from the room. In the silence, broken only by the renewed beep of the heart monitor and the whimpers from the patient, emanating now from beneath an oxygen mask, they were back to high noon, the deputies waiting for sheriff-lady's word to start shooting. Apart from being shoved an inch to the left by nurses, McCullough hadn't moved. She had watched him throughout his little act, silent. If his doctorliness in a crisis impressed her, she didn't show it.

"We can't wait for you to save the world, Dr. House," she finally spoke. She studied the patient. "Besides which, I'm beginning to think those skills of yours are overrated. Do all your patients die while you're treating them?"

"Maybe it's because he sees the only doctor who can save his life is about to be carted off to prison."

Her tight mouth softened into something that was not a smile. "Jail, not prison," she said quietly. "For now. And there's no cart. You'll have to walk."

At her sign the cop beside him had his wrist in a painful grip, the handcuffs ready.

"No - _no_."

"Are you resisting arrest, Dr. House?" A hitch in her voice, the question real, and it struck him with the force of a pistol blow to the gut that she was frightened too. That she didn't know whether she wanted him to resist or not because she was at odds with what she was doing. Her stiffness only a wall to hide behind. The jolt of it left him calmer inside. It meant that something was still there. Even if it was only respect for him, it meant that she was having trouble with it.

That she wasn't having fun any more.

"No," he told her. "I just –" He suddenly couldn't look at her. The goon beside him waited again, a robot she could set back in motion with a gesture. The handcuffs looked efficient. He took a deep breath. "I really do have to walk." _You know that_. "Look, my aikido's really suffered since the infarction. I'm not going to attack your guys." She waited. "Unless you want to spend an hour getting down the hall, I – I need the cane." _Don't beg_. "Please."

The word made her lips part. She nodded and the men flanked him as he retrieved the cane from the bed rail and hobbled out ahead of them, leaving the patient behind them groaning muffled protests into the mask. Foreman trailed them. Staff and nurses forming a channel for them in varying degrees of shocked silence as they headed down the hall gave it an air of military parade. At the elevator they crowded in, leaving Foreman standing in the hall. "Look, what am I supposed to do now?" his fellow asked. "A department of one? How do I solve this case alone?" The neurologist sounded disgusted rather than frightened.

"Get Jackson from Cardiology to consult," House told him. "He owes me a favor." McCullough had pushed the down button. He held the door open with his cane. "Oh, and just in case I never come back" – he felt her stiffen beside him "-tell Wilson the two grand I owe him is hidden in my office."

Foreman frowned. "You hid two thousand dollars in your office?"

"No, but it'll make me feel good to think he's looking." The door closed.

In the unmarked car that waited outside they sat him in the back, separated from McCullough and the goon in the driver's seat by a bulletproof glass. They had handcuffed him for the ride after all. The hospital buildings sliding away outside the window and then the elm-lined street beyond felt unfamiliar, dream material, foggy images already fading to irrelevance in the world he had awoken into. A world where the trouble he was in was as real as the knot of dread in his gut. Trouble that wouldn't go away with a snide remark. He kept his gaze on the back of McCullough's neck ahead of him in the passenger seat, her hair crushed against the glass where she leaned back, the thick blond braid prim and inviolate. So old-fashioned. If not for the glass he could have reached out and touched it.

****


	6. Prisoners of Our Own Device

**Aberrant – Chapter 6**

6. Prisoners of Our Own Device

Ailyn McCullough stood behind the two-way mirror to watch her partner interrogate House.

She had never been so aware of a detainee's body, she thought, the tilt of his head, the angle of his hands on the table that were either prepping to play a piano or pushing Chase away mentally. He had looked surprised when Chase had entered the room instead of her. Her own hands were jammed into the pockets of her blazer where no one could see them shake. Fingering the confiscated bottle of pills there. Her breath fogged the glass, layering a misty sheen over Greg House's face, and she realized she was standing far too close to the window and moved away.

Chase took a seat with his back to the viewer room and placed a tape recorder before the detainee with a flourish.

"Three words, Dr. House."

"I can think of so many phrases that fit."

"As I'm sure you know, internal calls in the hospital are recorded. One of our men remembered you with a phone in your hand at the right time yesterday morning." Chase punched a button on the cassette player.

The voice on the tape that spoke after Allison Cameron's "Hello" was unhurried and clearly enunciated. It said, "Morgue. Dead body." The clunk of the phone being dropped by Cameron afterward seemed to twist Robert Chase's shoulders. He leaned forward quickly and shut off the cassette. "That is you, is it not, Dr. House?"

"Either it's me or it's Memorex."

"Do you want to explain what those three words meant? I assume you weren't talking to Dr. Cameron about a patient."

House stared at his interrogator for a moment. "All right." She felt dizzy, awash with sudden grief that he could give in so easily. "It was our secret code to meet for sex on the roof."

She saw Chase's shoulders stiffen. When the Australian's voice finally came it was chipped out of rock. "Do you think I'm dumb?"

"Let's just say I've seen more intelligent life under a microscope."

"Well, let me just say this: the minimum for aiding and abetting a Christian is two years. Your call to Allis- to Dr. Cameron - was a warning, abetting her escape. A judge won't see it any differently."

House leaned in, hands folded, suddenly the interrogator himself. He had that ability to switch the balance of power with a look, she thought, as though the weight of his presence tipped the room toward him, "Let's say, Detective Chase, you were to know a work colleague had Christian leanings – maybe because he confessed to you late one evening over scotch or because you had had opportunity to become aware of the cross tattooed on his left butt cheek. One day you look out and see the cops storming in downstairs. You joke, 'Hey, the police are coming to get you,' and he bolts. Is that abetting? Did you 'warn' him?" Chase seemed to sag beneath House's domination of the conversation. As an interrogator he shouldn't have been letting the detainee ask the questions. "And should you tell them about the guy's butt?"

"The fact is that you planned it with her. It was a code all right. A pre-arranged code. The fact is that Cameron got away after your warning. Quite likely through the morgue, the pick-up for dead bodies. It's at the back on a lower level, it wasn't being watched –"

"Exactly. You guys should have had every entrance covered before you went in for her, and you didn't." Far from fear at the trouble he was in, House's voice held amusement. "You really screwed the pooch."

Which was true. The men in charge of the arrest, Coombs and Avery, were in deep sewage for having botched it.

"The fact is –" She winced at Chase repeating himself. " – you knew Allison Cameron didn't just have leanings. No, this is the way it went. You were given a message by Michael Nealy, hidden on your person, on your first visit to him in Kearney and you were told someone would meet you somewhere for the drop-off. Somewhere public, is how they would do it. A train station or a park. The person turned out to be Allison Cameron."

House's hands on the table were still. "Me? Carry messages? You're out of your tree. My brain can't get a message to my feet some mornings."

"Either you knew about Cameron already or more likely you were surprised to see her there. I doubt very much she would have confessed her deepest secret to someone like you before that, when it took her so long to even confess it to me." Chase seemed to realize how far it catapulted him into the personal. "In any event you made plans with her to help her escape if the time came." He paused. "And you know where she is now." It was a shot in the dark, and Ailyn could tell House knew. Chase wasn't good enough to keep the doubt out of his voice.

Charlie Dalton, who had come in behind her, knew it too. "Why aren't you in there?" he asked her. There was true curiosity in his voice. "Robert can't hack it."

_The question they would all be asking_. "Dr. House is the consummate manipulator," she told him. "Robert needs practice on someone like that. Let him learn a little. We can still take it to another level with House later."

"How much later?"

She paused for effect, her heart thudding out of rhythm, then turned to him. "You don't really think time is of the essence here anymore, do you? It's been twenty-four hours. Allison Cameron's long gone. The Christians will have vanished her by now. All it is now is about getting a confession out of House."

Charlie shrugged.

She turned back to the glass to hide her relief and fingered the bottle of pills in her pocket. As long as they accepted she was still the boss in the matter, she could save him from the worst. She had a plan.

Behind the window House had steered the subject - by some means she couldn't follow - to Chase and his relationship to Cameron. "-and so from her comments – one memorable one in fact over the body of a patient who had just died – I deduced that Cameron had at least had contact with Christians at some point. Whereas _you_, Detective Chase –" Amusement curled his lip again. "-remained clueless in spite of getting close enough to her to see the whites of her eyes for weeks." He winked. "You Tasmanian devil, you."

"Shut your damn mouth."

The shock made Ailyn's hands in her pockets ball to fists. Behind her Charlie drew in a breath. Emotion was a no-no. Chase was losing it completely.

House leaned back, satisfied enough to back off the subject. "Odd, isn't it? 'Devil' and 'damn' – they're religious terms. Like 'soul' and 'heaven' – all remnants from a time before religion decayed. We use the words without thinking. I can say 'Damn you'" – his voice suddenly low and purposeful – "or 'Go to hell, Detective Chase'." Chase's back looked stiff enough to crack in two, and she wished she could see her partner's face, if only to throw him a look that would calm him. "And no one calls it a Christian leaning when we do, because we all do it. Maybe CA should arrest everyone who ever says 'damn' and 'hell'. What do you think, Detective McCullough?" He lifted his head abruptly to study the mirror and she saw the uncertainty in his eyes, wondering if she was there.

Chase's hand came up to rub the back of his neck. "Allison Cameron was messed up."

"Was she?"

"She told me all about it when she confessed to me. She was proselytized by her husband. She met him when she was…young and impressionable. The love of her life. They got married and within a year he was dead from cancer. He used that time to introduce her to the Christianity his whole family had practiced secretly since he was little. It was that…love, at a time when she was very vulnerable, and the peace in the way he died, she told me, that changed her entire view of things." Chase's hand came away from his neck and fell to the table with a thud of defeat. "It caught her at a time when she was weak. It was brainwashing, pure and simple."

She realized she'd never seen Greg House surprised. He obviously hadn't known the story. His eyes were fathomless. "I didn't even know she'd been married," he said, almost to himself.

The viewing-room door opened behind her and Chuck Blenheim marched in to stand with her at the glass. Charlie looked back and forth between them and then left them alone. She forced her hands in her pockets to relax.

"I'm going to have House rendered to the B&B," her boss informed her. Succinct and simple, no beating around the bush.

_Say anything_. "House is not a good subject for render."

"No?"

"House is not a Christian, or some gopher for the Christians." She shrugged. "You forget, I've spent some time with House." Repeating his name probably sounded odd, yet she didn't trust herself to say _him_, the pronoun somehow so…indicative of the man there behind the glass, her heightened awareness of his body, leaning now toward Chase again in some intimate manipulation, that she didn't think she could have kept the emotion out of her voice.

"I've called some of my friends down there," Blenheim continued as though she hadn't spoken. "They're willing to provide him a room."

No one ever asked what the B's in the B&B stood for. The Virginia facility's nickname had been established long before she entered CA. The place for the hard cases to be rendered to, the place where the teams the public didn't know about worked. She had been required to visit it only once in her career, to preside at a prisoner's interrogation there on orders of her old boss, a memory she managed on good days to suppress. She found it hard to breathe. "Call the B&B back and cancel."

"Are you giving me orders, Detective?"

"Look." She had to keep it from sounding like a plea. Had to make it sound like she had some motive that would be in line with Blenheim's own streak of cruelty. "Allison Cameron's out of reach now. We can take our time with House. All you want is a confession – that he helped her escape, maybe that he ran messages, which I still doubt." Her hand closed on the bottle of Vicodin in her pocket and she took it out and showed him. "This is the way to break House." Her hand was steady. "It'll need time, three or four days, but –" Blenheim was watching her instead of the bottle, unreadable. _Think_. "This will be more effective than the B&B. Effective in a different way. Anyone can be broken by the B&B, we both know that, and House would know it too. Giving in to something like that wouldn't mean anything, but this –" she rattled the pills – "this is his own weakness. I want – " She could let slip her true emotions, she realized, enough to make her voice quiver, and turn them in the false direction. "_I want to see him broken by this_. I want to see him knowing it, that it's his own character flaw doing it to him. Three days of detox and he'll be on his knees, begging to confess to anything."

"Dr. House must have been very impolite to you."

"Haven't you ever had that with someone?" she asked. "Someone you'd like to just smash the superior look off their face, but you know that wouldn't do it." Something shifted in Blenheim; he was looking away, not at House but toward some memory. "Someone who looks down on you, who lets you know it, and you feel like you have to see them broken in some personal way, by their own weakness, because nothing else will…" She trailed off. The chief's slack mouth was scary. "…satisfy your hate."

"Yes," he replied to the wall. "Yes, I've – wanted to break someone like that."

Blenheim had his own ability to dominate a room, the way the smell of tar in the air might dominate a street though the workers pouring it remained unseen. His thoughts seemed to spill back from wherever they had gone. He shrugged, abruptly bored. "Do your detox thing with House if you want," he told her. She had to glance away at the two men in the room beyond to hide her face, the sweet stab of relief that threatened to make her eyes wet, and when she turned to Blenheim again, it was in time to catch the tail end of what must have been a long slow look up and down her. He suspected what she felt, and didn't care. "You're in charge, Detective."

Inside the interrogation room the two men had reached a shouting peak she had managed to miss and then backed off. Chase was almost trembling.

"I'll happily sign a confession on one thing," House was saying. "That I guessed Cameron was a Christian and did nothing about it –"

"You gave her a message from Nealy –"

"There was no message from Nealy. Nealy's a harmless old coot with a bad heart. Who might have gone on teaching his Wacky Ideas in Philosophy class until the end of his days if Dirty May hadn't happened. You've got no evidence of any of this. Did Cameron tell you she was involved in some underground?"

For a moment she thought Chase wouldn't answer. "No. Only that she was part of a group that met to practice Christianity among themselves, the one her husband had introduced her to."

"Nothing about political ties or activism? So you had no real reason to go after her with the big guns - you could have had her committed to therapy, without criminal prosecution. Thousands go that route all the time, when family members get a little religious on them, and it's allowed by law because theism is a disease. The guys in white coats could have come to pick her up, force-feed her some Norxylam, but no, it was the black uniforms because you assumed the worst. Betrayal of the highest order. Bad enough when you're sleeping with someone, but she was in love with you. I wouldn't want to know what she feels like now. I wouldn't want to know what _you_ feel like. Feel good about yourself?"

"Just shut up." Chase's hands on the table's edge were white.

"How could you have done that?" For a moment the provoking lilt disappeared from House's voice. The question was a real question, spoken low, the curiosity cum bemusement of a man who would never understand other people. "How could you have had something like that and thrown it away?" He leaned in, his gaze roaming his interrogator's face with an honest sadness that tore at her. "Cameron thought you just about hung the moon."

From behind, Chase seemed to crumble.

The moment faded and House leaned back. "So, what are we wasting time here for? You have no evidence of underground involvement, either hers or mine. This is all a farce anyway – the questioning, signed confessions." He was strident again. "You guys don't need evidence – that all went down the tubes with the rest of our rights - so why don't you just get on with it –"

"I would love to –"

"Go on and encapsulate my rights for the good of society. You don't need suspicion. You don't need any reason at all other than all of you pissing in your pants at the mention of Christianity –"

You damn –"

"You don't like the color of my eyes, beat the crap out of me. It's what you would have done to her. Tell me, would you have taken care of that personally, Detective?"

Chase lunged across the table and threw a punch that caught House's left ear as he ducked. It spun House from his chair and landed him on his right knee. A short, sharp cry burst from him. Ailyn was already charging out of the room, past Blenheim who stood gazing at the glass with a small smile as though the two men had merely shaken hands. She flung open the interrogation door as House was picking himself up. Chase stood breathing hard, his fist still clenched.

"Robert." It took all her will not to yell it.

"Oh good," House said. His eyes on her were bright, as though the punch had woken him up. "Maybe now we'll see some real action. Dial Tone here was getting on my nerves."

She gestured _Get out_ to Chase and watched her partner snatch up the tape recorder. As he passed her she saw him eject the tape furtively and slip it into his pocket, and she understood as though he'd e-mailed his thoughts to her that he was lifting it to have something left of Cameron. The _Hello_, and the thud of the dropped telephone, she saw in a flash, he would play again and again when he was alone. The thought left her so sad she almost stopped him.

He disappeared around the corner.

At her gesture the guard led House into the hall. "Dr. House is going to a cell for a while," she told them. "Chief's orders."

"For a while?" House studied her while the guard handed him his cane for the walk down the hall. "A euphemism for 'Throw away the key', Detective McCullough? I have a medical condition."

"I know." She made the briefest show of shaking the bottle of pills and then slipped it back into her pocket. Understanding shot through him. The twist in his mouth said _Please no_.

"Why don't you just beat me up?" he implored.

She watched the guard usher him down the hall. Charlie Dalton came to stand beside her. "I just saw Blenheim in the detail room," he told her. "Said he'd dumped it all in your lap. Not his usual can-do self on this case, is he?"

"He saw it my way. We're going to let House steep in his own detox juices for a few days."

"You know –" Charlie was one of those she termed the neutrals, affixing no moral tags to the job he did, and she knew he liked her. "Blenheim says he figures you have shifty eyes."

"Compactor-face said that?"

"He told me once your eyes reminded him of something shifty he could never place. I admit, he was drunk at the time, that one time he joined the guys at Tally's for drinks back when he first started, which the catastrophe that turned out I don't even want to talk about." He shrugged. "Just thought I'd let you know."

It was a more-than-neutral warning, from a friend, and she nodded a thanks before he walked off.

**

"_So he's in there right now. I feel like I'm in there with him. Like everything I do out here is a dream. Walking around, doing my job. I can't stop imagining him in the cell…am I in there with him?"_

"_Everyone is."_

****

He had seen the real fur when he was ten.

They had been stationed in Italy, a dusty world of perpetual summer, or so it had seemed to him, the tiny village so near the military base that he played soccer with the village children every day, dusty vowel-shrill Italians who communicated through the ball. The fur was already unidentifiable when he first saw it, road-kill that had been stamped into the side-street he took home so thoroughly that the bit of gray fur and skin seemed to grow from the cobbles, no animal body discernible, reduced to a patch of hair glued to the stones by its own juices gone black and hard. For weeks he passed it every day, watching it grow more ragged. A kind of horrified fascination at its durability took hold of him. The thought that whatever the fur had been had lived and breathed, that some force would not allow it to release this disgusting hold on the physical world, got behind his eyes and ate at him. He was ten; he couldn't understand. Throughout the summer the fur shrank until it was nothing but two or three gray hairs that waved at him in passing when a breeze stirred. Old village men stopped to stare at the foreign kid staring at nothing in the street. His father went through one of his phases, and one morning when the strong arms had shoved him up against the kitchen wall again for some small infraction, the forearm at his throat choking him, he saw that the arms had gray fur on them. His screams had been so disconcerting his father had backed off in alarm.

The walls of the cell the CA guard took him to were covered in gray fur.

An effect of the cinderblock, he knew. The lined surface of the concrete, viewed from the bunk where he lay, seemed a matted nest of fine hairs. The cell was acoustically dead (and how did they do that?) so that the sound of his voice when he talked to himself was swallowed up, creating that impression he would not give in to as the hours passed of something soft and relentless growing down from the ceiling to smother him. The hairs in the ceiling he stared at began to stir as the last dregs of the Vicodin wore off, its half-life - a fitting term – set at four hours, he knew, but inapplicable to him as so many assumptions were, so that it was more like eight hours before the pain and nausea arrived together, and he saw the fur moving, alive, as he had seen it many times in his life since that dusty summer, a softness writhing in the corner of his vision whenever life began to choke him. The fur had come to his cell now to tell him what his leg could do to him.

A hundred fingers dug into his thigh, then took up razorblades. He made a game of pretending to wrench the invisible hands away with his fist, mind over matter, again and again, but it was always matter over mind, he would never beat it, who had ever made that phrase up anyway, as though minds were not the weak whimpering things they were. The fur brushed his mouth with its delicate reminder of the horror of life. He reeled to the metal toilet and threw up. The guard with the drinker's nose who had deposited him in the cell thrust in a meal through the door's slot – supper, his inner clock said - that looked like what had just gone down the toilet and he told him to give it to McCullough. The guy left it there.

Pain was a philosophical question. The blood that carried life carried pain, metastasizing it. The light in the cell stayed on at what his clock said was night, their nod to sleep deprivation, he grasped through his thick thoughts. When he closed his eyes a smell of old blood rose from the fur, the sensation of fur slipping down his throat, choking him, his own very old blood filling him up, filling out the empty mold of him until he was nothing but a blood-clot of fiery man-shaped pain beneath a veneer of skin. He dozed in the light. Ailyn McCullough came to him; her eyes were no longer ice; they had softened to a velvet blue that wanted him and was angry with him for it. They stood on the tightrope facing each other, so close her scent comforted him. There was no room to go forward. Below the rope lay a pit of dark. We have to pass each other, she said. We'll fall off together, he told her. He didn't know if he meant it as a fear or a solution.

When he woke a breakfast indistinguishable from the supper sat in the slot, and he ate it and threw it up.

Four days passed.

Wilson's face appeared in the door from time to time, as he came to rescue him. He thought of Wilson, working desperately to get him out, calling lawyers and newspapers, badgering CA to disclose what was happening to him, while Cuddy and Foreman stood by and gnawed their nails. Wilson knew about the fur. Wilson would be throwing the door open any minute while CA men cowered behind him. He would tell him about the fur on the walls.

He cried for a case – anything to beat his thoughts off the animals feeding on his thigh – and solved old cases in his head.

On the third day he told the guard he wanted to confess. It would get him out of the reek of his vomit, until they tumbled to the fact that he didn't mean it, and he might find something along the way to cut his leg off with. The guard ignored him.

"Tell McCullough –" The guard had taken the tray and was walking off. "Tell Ailyn –" Tell her what? The word felt like sand. She had given him her first name to use like a charm, he had thought at the time, a token, get out of jail free. He lay on the bunk and tried out Damn you instead. The etymology of which had left Chase cold. Was she watching? The cell was too featureless for a camera. "Damn you, damn you, damn you." Say it and you'll get religion, something inside him laughed. A little religious feeling to feel guilty about. Something to make the suffering worth it. I worship a white pill. I'm a theist. The words Damn you became a muttered chain, as he hopped back to the bed and fell on it, hypnotic (_damyudamyudamyu_), and then he was no longer cursing, the chain at some point turning into _stoppleasestop_ while he clutched his leg and who was he asking, all fetal now on the sickening mattress _pleasepleasepleasestop_. A voice – Wilson's, strangely – said, _This is praying_.

Lunch on the fourth day was handcuffs.

The guard made him extend his hands through the slot and clicked the handcuffs on him. The door opened. "My cane," he rasped when he saw the guy carried only a leather sap, and the guard got in his face and growled, "Walk."

The hall seemed endless. He walked on a sword that rammed its red-hot point up his hip and through his head every time he put weight on it. He slumped against the wall.

"Walk."

The guard stood close. His breath was grain alcohol. It smelled like something he swabbed with at the hospital. They were only halfway down the hall.

"McCullough…" His throat was sandpaper. "McCullough let me have my cane."

The guard's snort of disgust blew breath in his face. He felt sick. "McCullough wants to talk to you. You know what I think about _talk_?" The guard stood so close the veins in his nose looked like clown paint. "You Christians make me sick. God is love and let's kill some people. And since we're gutless sickos let's use a bomb, make it innocent people and kids." The guy's hate was a heat coming off him. "You should all be thrown in a hole and nuked yourselves. And they wanna _talk_." Another snort. "Won't hardly lift a finger anymore 'cause people are starting to get upset about it. Well, maybe they won't – but I will."

The guard's knee slammed into the scar in his thigh so hard that it shoved him a foot along the wall and doubled him over. The pain was no longer pain; it spun the world around him, sapping the air until there was nothing left but flame. He couldn't breathe.

"That's not from McCullough," the guard whispered in his ear. "That's from me."

Through the swirling pain the lie of it struck him. The truth exploding in his head like a new pain - it _was_ from her. Even if she hadn't ordered it, she might as well have kneed him herself. Ailyn McCullough - the cause of every moment of suffering in the last few days, the one who had ordered him to be left without his pills, one more day of which (and if she only knew that) would have broken him until he was ready to say or do anything. It could still happen. He would crawl into the interrogation room on all fours, he saw now through the throbbing heat of the pain, and she would take one look, smile, and send him back, throw away the key literally. Inside him something akin to hate rose. It didn't want to be hate. Hate was crippling. It wanted to beat her at the game, hide just what it was she had done to him, laugh in her surprised face, but the pain still rippled through him in waves of hot and cold. There was no strength left to prove himself with. _No one can be that strong alone_. For a moment he couldn't remember who had said that, then the image of Nealy came, broken on the prison bed, his heart tearing him apart from the inside. _Only an irrational belief can give you strength_, Nealy had said, _when your problems are irrational ones_.

He pulled himself upright and took a step toward the far-away door. Every move was a blowtorch to his thigh. "I believe – " – _in the irrational need to give McCullough the finger_ – "in myself," he gasped.

The guard frowned. "Walk."

The hall was endless.

****


	7. Wish I Was Sober

Aberrant – Chapter 7

7. Wish I was Sober

She checked on him through the two-way glass for a second before going in.

He had gotten bored with the wait in the interrogation room or knew he was being watched and had begun to sing songs, changing the lyrics to suit himself. The tiny room made his voice large – "I won't forget, can't regret, what I diiid…for…fun." His voice trailed off when he saw it was her.

"Torture's really gone down the tubes if forced detox is all you people can come up with."

She sat across from him and put the bottle of pills on the table.

He looked perkier than she had expected. Not the face of a man in pain. Perhaps the rise and fall of his chest was harder than usual. She could smell him. His eyes still held the same clear stunning chokehold on whatever he looked at, but they were red-rimmed now, bright with fever. His hair looked like it had been styled by a monkey on meth. A bruise beside his left ear from Chase's meltdown was turning yellow. He stared at the bottle and swallowed.

"You should be thankful –" she told him, while she opened the bottle and poured pills onto the table – "that my boss let me go this route with you." She swirled a fingertip in the pile. "There are worse things than not getting what you need, Dr. House." She lifted a pill and dangled it as if unintentionally, a bit of meat to tempt a starving dog, but at his look – half scorn, half ravenous desire – she felt absurd and put it down.

"Your boss must be a real cupcake."

"My boss is a hard-liner. You've gotten off easy so far. He eats collaborators for breakfast. His pet peeve is sympathizers like you."

"Believe me, sympathy is not an emotion I'm known for."

"People who may not succumb to Christianity, but who think they're 'doing the right thing' helping them get away from us. We have enough problems with symps here, I'll be honest with you."

"Oh yes, be honest. Since we're playing 'good cop' today."

His hand, she was aware, had begun to stroke the table near the pills, as if brushing away cobwebs. It might have been unconscious. "There are Christian spies, here inside CA," she told him. His hand stopped moving. He looked genuinely surprised. "We know because every now and then a detainee escapes, with help from the inside."

"Really? Your John Galt must be taking out full-page ads."

"They walk out in the dead of night, their records are changed, fingerprint scans deleted from the computers. Or they vanish during transport to another facility. Some little guy's always thrown to the wolves for it, but no one knows who's really in on it. Or how many there are. The truth is – " She refrained from leaning forward. The 'confide' game was a subtle one, even if all the facts she told him were true. " – the underground movement out there is much larger than we let on. There are more sympathizers every day, and they're getting organized. It puts pressure on us."

"Boo hoo."

"Society's forgetting Dirty May, thinking it couldn't happen again. All the civil liberties we've lost are suddenly more important_._ The Encapsulation of Rights Act is wrong, the camps are wrong. There was a fake documentary a few years ago called 'Punishment Park'. It pretended to show the true conditions in the camps –"

"I remember hearing about it."

"We had it pulled from the theaters, but copies still circulate. It started something. No one's worried about their safety from terrorism anymore."

"Maybe they're finally realizing that was an artefact of perspective all along. Something as out of the ordinary as Dirty May happens and your take on it is skewed for a long time. You see threat everywhere –"

"It's not a matter of perspective that Christians took the credit for the bombs. You can go listen to the taped message if you have the right clearance."

"Someone calling themselves Christians."

"I know as well as you do that there are two different groups we're dealing with. The terrorists are not the same as the ones who just need a little Norxylam." At the mention of the anti-theic he looked away. "Personally I don't think you belong to either group, Dr. House. You're one of those rare people acting on a strong personal belief in – how did the song go? – fun? See, I got the message. You'd stick it to either side if you could watch them go at each other's throats. Which is probably the way you operate at the hospital. No pun intended." His lip was already curling. "I'm sure it was fun to help Cameron escape, but you got caught. And now we need a confession. My boss needs a confession, even if it won't mean anything for our further investigation. The chief has a thing about Nealy – we need to know if Nealy's still in contact with his groups, if the contact was Cameron. There are degrees of aiding and abetting and if you help us out here, you probably won't go to prison –"

"Probably?"

"Two years' probation, maybe some psych tests – a Millon or an MMPI."

"Ah, the old Minnesota Inventory. I thought I blew the parameters on that one so thoroughly the last time I was tested that they would have retired it by now."

" – if necessary a trial treatment with Norxylam." She tried to keep her voice steady. "But no prison."

He was actually fidgeting, twisting to look at a far corner or his knuckles, anywhere except at her or the pills. His hand on the table brushed cobwebs again, a movement to camouflage the shakes, she realized, and she wished she were somewhere else, some place where she could place her hand over his and still it.

"Look," he told her. "I – I can't be given Norxylam. There are things you don't know about that drug. My brain is precious to me –"

"You would never touch mind-altering substances."

"I'm an addict." It was spoken honestly, NA-meeting style. "I know that. I also know I do it to myself. I can tailor it to change what I want to change about myself –" His other hand rubbed his thigh. " – but I can't abide someone else putting things in me to change what _they_ think's wrong. My head's still mine." It ended on a lame note, as though he had intended to say something else, some argument that would convince her, held back by the mirror behind her at which he glanced now surreptitiously. "Look, I don't know how serious you are – whether I'd be opening myself up to treatment or prison or whether you could get me out of any of it. All that stuff about spies in CA was crap in any case. I have no reason to trust what you say."

"Just confess." Her voice sounded small, a plea on a personal level. "Give us anything, and I'll do everything in my power to see that you walk out, on probation. That you go back to work. That you get these back." Their hands, come to rest near the pills, almost touched.

"Confess, huh? Think taking my toys away has turned me into a marshmallow with the will of Sponge Bob, don't you?" His eyes were red and glistening. "Well, you're right." He stared at the pills. The rush of disappointment clogged her throat. She should have felt triumph. He took a deep breath. "So I confess, Detective. I shot Kennedy."

She wanted to beat her head on the table. She could sense the others laughing – whoever had popped into the viewing room to have a look – Charlie, Blenheim, possibly Robert, but their laughter was directed at her. "None of it's serious, is it?" she murmured.

"And I – I drowned Marilyn."

"You don't take one thing seriously."

"Cancer. Cancer's serious."

"Isn't there even one thing –" her voice, on a personal level, so frustrated now it was headed toward shrill – "_one_ thing that you take seriously, Dr. House? Something you can't make a joke out of. Everyone has something like that. A rule or precept that they act on or live by." Definitely shrill. "You're not a drughead." He was studying her oddly. The sarcasm had drained from his face, leaving it older. "I know you've given some thought to life. I know there's something there in that head of yours."

"My maxim for life? Is that what you're asking me, Detective?"

"Yes."

He leaned forward, intense. "Never play 'The Ride of the Valkyries' unless you really mean it."

"What?"

He shrugged. "You asked."

Before she knew what she was doing she had slapped the table with her palm. The mother at her rope's end with her unruly child. The gesture was so feminine it shocked her mouth open with embarrassment. House saw it too.

"Wow," he murmured. "Maybe you could use one of mommy's little helpers." He flicked a pill at her.

She stood, almost knocking the chair over, and turned away to face the mirror. Another feminine gesture. She would be hearing PMS jokes for weeks. They had thought Robert had lost it too quickly when he interrogated House, but Robert Chase was a man; he was allowed his anger. She was just a rattled woman.

Rattled by so many things she couldn't tell them, fractured by stresses acting on her from so many obstinate angles, that she would have to turn herself into stone if she didn't want to show it. But stone could fracture too.

When she focused on the mirror again she saw behind her that House had moved. He sat doubled over with his forehead on the table's edge. Total collapse the moment she had turned away. His back heaved up and down in the shallow rhythm of pain. She turned to look at him directly. "Dr. House?"

He straightened back into himself, nonchalant as though it hadn't happened. His face was white and sheened with sweat. Her heart skipped a beat. "Sorry. I got so bored I decided to tie my shoelaces together."

_You are torturing someone_. In ten years of working Christian Affairs she had had the thought only once before, the cool tip of its tentacle thrusting up into her throat, gagging her, but then it had been justified, so utterly and unerringly justified, she had known… Nothing here was justified. He hurt. All the strength he could muster, the force that kept him upright in his chair and which he made look effortless, was close to sputtering out.

She felt the room around her fade. It didn't matter what they would say. "Do you like me?" she asked him. The question seemed to startle him. She found she had sat back down across from him. He raised a blanched eyebrow. "Because I like you, Dr. House."

"Very, very good cop." He frowned slightly. "I think I liked the bad cop better. Jackboots and all."

"I want to help you. We just need a confession."

"Don't tell me. You like me so much you would commit me to a course of Norxylam for my own good, right? It's the way we take care of our own in these troubled times when they're sick. Tough love."

"It wouldn't be the worst –"

"You know -" He was looking past her in lecture-hall fashion, lost in thought, though his fists clenched and unclenched. "I was doing some…research lately, and I came across an interesting article. A sort of exercise in alternate history." His eyes met hers. "This author theorized that our world would still be permeated with religion today if history had taken just a slightly different turn. No, stay with me here a moment. Churches on every corner like supermarkets, religious ed in schools, if you can imagine. His idea was that the only reason religion vanished in the Middle Ages was because the Black Plague was as virulent as it was. Ninety-nine percent of Europe died, you know. That's a lot. It left basically nothing, so society was pretty much all new when it started up again. The few who did survive weren't inclined to believe in God anymore, even if it had been a pretty prevalent idea before that, since God had apparently been napping in a corner while they went through it all. Then there's the very reason anyone survived at all – the discovery of penicillin in the 14th century." He bent into his story as he spoke, almost vigorous, intellectual discourse for the moment allowing him to forget his pain. "I mean, the mold had been around. They weren't exactly refrigerating their food. It had always been a folk remedy for skin disease and someone just made the right connection. Stopped the plague before it hit one hundred percent. And behold, another reason not to believe in God. Because _we_ had done it. Science. We had saved ourselves." The phrase reverberated with meaning. He was almost smiling. "So, this author's theory was you postulate a less virulent strain of plague, fewer deaths, so society stays intact the way it was, and less faith in this wild new gizmo science because penicillin is not discovered until, say, hundreds of years later, and he figures religion might not have gone into the lime pit back then along with all those bodies. We'd still have it around today. A driving force, more real to some people than science."

_You are so very smart. Too intelligent for your own good_. "Science replaced god and we never looked back." When she spoke he looked up, the fever-light in his eyes telling her she had connected. "Medical science in particular. You like that idea."

"I do." He seemed to come out of a trance. "The point is – if religion had 100-percent market saturation only a few centuries ago – something the history books gloss over, as in leave out entirely – well then did everyone have the theist anomaly back then? And if so, when did most of us evolve it out? Evolution's not a short-order cook. Takes a little longer than six hundred years. And even if it were possible, why would we have evolved so differently than most of Asia and the Middle East where religion is still prevalent?"

"You're saying we all still have it."

"Or I'm saying no one does." _Too smart_. "And what does that leave Norxylam to bind to in the brain? What's it _doing_ in there?" The integrity in his face chilled her. She wanted to cry _Don't_. For a moment they sat silently and she imagined the watchers behind the glass turning to one another with narrowed looks. "I've been a fool," he added. "I think a lot of us have."

It was the end. There was nothing left to say, or ask, that wouldn't be digging his grave deeper for him. He seemed to understand it too. "So, is it back to my cell now, Detective?" he murmured.

"No, Dr. House. You can go home." She slid the pills into the bottle, placed it in her pocket and stood.

The tortured, iron-willed in the grip of pain, will fall down and cry when released. She watched the strain of the last four days bleed into his face from whatever lockbox he had kept it in. With no need to fight, he crumbled. A hand swept out, accompanied by a low "Ah" as though he had just registered that the pills were no longer in front of him to be snatched, and then his head came down to rest on the table again.

"It'll take a little while to process your release. You'll be given all your possessions at the front." _Go on and hate yourself_. "If there's anything you feel we ought to know, then you can get back in contact with us." The farce of it elicited no response from him. She had become the voice on the airport speaker, far-away and tinny, that no one listened to. There was nothing left to do except leave, and yet the _I'm sorry_ played at the back of her throat, holding her there for a second as she stared down at the slick of curls that was the back of his head.

****

Lisa Cuddy was good at ignoring men's glances, practice makes perfect, and when ignoring didn't work there was always the stare-back, a subtle version of which had just made the smarmy cop at the front desk finally look away, when Greg House appeared from the inner hall. He turned away when he saw her, with what could only have been a disconcerted twist, and by the time she had reached him he was waiting at the pick-up window for his things. She had seen him looking worse, but it didn't keep the rasp out of her voice.

"Are you all right?"

"Wilson too busy consoling some dying patient to come pick me up?"

If the cop hadn't been looking again, she would have hugged him in relief. Whatever they had done to him, he was the same. "They called my office to say they were letting you go. I couldn't find Wilson." He was fumbling through his things, his wallet, the bike keys, searching the pockets of the Belstaff jacket the jailor behind the window thrust at him. The fact that she was not Wilson seemed to have thrown him a right cross. "You could be thankful, you know," she told him.

"That's right." The woman who had come up behind them Lisa recognized from the CA visit to her office that felt centuries ago. The name escaped her. She had admired the woman's intensity then, the balance the detective had obviously found that made men take her seriously. Taken a little too far in fact, with the non-statement slacks and blazer and the braid pulled back tightly to render her soft face stern. Or maybe it was just her life that made her look like she ate a lemon every morning. House's slow intake of breath told her the two had gotten to know each other. McCullough, that was her name. McCullough pulled House's prescription bottle from her pocket and handed it to him. "You should be grateful," the detective told him.

"Grateful? That I will forever associate your face now with puking my guts out?"

McCullough looked as though he'd slapped her. House didn't notice. Odd, she thought, how men could be so closed to the very signals they were always hoping to elicit. Detective McCullough, she could see, was so in love with House she might as well have been shouting it out loud. A frequency only other women picked up, she supposed, radio waves made up of body language and certain fluttery movements that men's brains were not attuned to. The way the woman searched House's face with anger it was obvious she would have liked nothing better than to crush him to her and put her mouth on his.

Instead the detective said, "You're being closed without finding, Dr. House." She indicated the file she carried. "That means –"

"I know what it means. We do it to patients' abdomens a lot." House was shaking pills into a shaking hand. Together they watched him down two in quick succession.

"Also known as being blue-filed," McCullough added. "As in laid on ice."

"I'm a cold case."

"Definitely."

He weighed a third pill in his palm and Lisa saw Detective McCullough's small firm hand shoot out and hold his wrist, the pressure of concern making her grasp it too hard. He gave the hand his most contemptuous look. "But you can be red-filed anytime," she told him. "Anytime we have new information. It's not over."

He extricated his wrist and swallowed the pill.

"Home?" The blond Australian she remembered thinking had been too pink-cheeked for his job had come up behind them. House looked the questioner up and down, scanning him for lunacy.

"No," he replied, "I'm going to hit a strip joint I know over on Palmer. Nice of you to ask though."

Detective Chase frowned his own bafflement. "I just wanted you to know that this is not over -"

"Wow, do you and McCullough practice in your off hours or what?"

Detective McCullough was studying the floor.

"And that we'll still have an eye on you," Chase finished. He tried to stare House down, found he couldn't, and left to talk to the cop at the front desk.

_We'll all have an eye on you, House_, Lisa thought. It was time to leave. She flicked his sleeve and he nodded, but at the last second, as though he couldn't help it, he turned back to McCullough.

"There's something wrong with your Goring, Adolf."

"What?" McCullough looked confused.

"Your partner. He's crooked."

"I know you don't like Robert, Dr. House, but he's not corrupt."

House was shaking his head. "He's tilted."

Which was true, she saw, as the three of them turned to gaze at the blond detective still chatting at the end of the hall. He stood off-balance, upper torso at one-o'clock, blithely unaware of it. "Half a bubble off plumb, I'd say," House murmured. "Plus he couldn't remember my name. He called me Home."

"He was asking –"

"He was calling me Home. As in his brain connected wrong to the concept _house_."

"He's just tired." The excuse from McCullough sounded worried.

"Right." He shrugged, suddenly so tired himself she thought he might collapse before they made it to the door. "So - sayonara and happy hunting, Detective McCullough."

She couldn't look at McCullough's face as they left.

And in the car, on the highway bloodied by a late November sun, other drivers yawning or grinning toward happy-hour, she saw him slip the bottle out of his pocket for another go and she spirited it from his weak grasp. Near-accident time as he lunged across her to fight for it, fumbling her like an incompetent lover while the car swerved, his shouts something about how they were having no effect, how he needed more. He didn't get them. For the rest of the ride he sat with his head flung far back, eyes closed, his throat a ragged contour, reminding her each time she glanced over of some primeval image of suffering, though she couldn't imagine where she had seen such a thing. At his apartment she helped him inside.

"I'm making coffee," she told him. "You go shower before the neighbors call the haz-mat people." His kitchen looked like he'd been gone four months rather than four days. When she came back into the living-room with a cup that read 'I Am Bioavailable', he was sitting on the floor propped against the piano leg. He made a too-happy gesture, the nutty conductor hearing violins she couldn't or just waving away invisible gnats, and she saw beside him the needle and phial of morphine, now empty, which a porn-video box lying open had apparently concealed.

She set the coffee on the piano and sank down beside him. His eyes were blue satin, barely seeing her. He was happy. They sat companionably for a moment, his shoulder against hers a pillar of strength, that sense of him always amazing her because he should have been the epitome of not-strength, the misanthropic weak-willed addict, but his instability in some twisted way became her stability, a tower in whose shadow she felt comfort though it threatened daily to collapse. It wasn't sexual attraction. His appearance didn't fit her type, she well knew – she inclined to the suave, more fleshed-out– but it wasn't about appearances at all. Something men rarely understood. She had gone out with so many who had assumed the body to be more important to women than it was. One who had even expressed to the dean of medicine his concern over his penis size. What she did not tell them because they would not have understood was that size mattered, but not the way they all thought, that you could be 5'1" with a dick like a nose-drop applicator and still be a big person. Greg House was a big person.

He lolled his head toward her. "Don't…think I'll make it to the strip joint." His voice was slurred, almost gone. "Maybe you can help me out." He was too wasted to wiggle his eyebrows.

"In your pipe dreams," she replied and got up to go make the sofa into a bed for herself.

****

End of Chapter 7

Reviews are welcome – I don't always know where this is going – it's 'evolving', so feedback is helpful - !!

Punishment Park is a real film.


	8. My Poetry to Protect Me

Aberrant

8. My Poetry to Protect Me

Then it was back at work because he refused to take the time off Cuddy offered, which work consisted in tossing a ball at the ceiling while Foreman helped out in the neurology department. The flow of passers-by outside his door seemed slowed and deliberate, or hurried and deliberate, the heads in any event deliberately not turning to look at him. Nurses he had had an in with turned their backs on him when he approached, some at least with a guilty hunch to their shoulders. He shaved on the third day so people would look at him, with no effect. He thought of taking his clothes off and streaking through the lobby, but a streaker with a cane and moving at the speed of a sedated turtle did not appeal. "I'm here, people," he muttered into the clinic logbook after the desk nurse had cut him once again and Wilson, who had come to lean beside him, who had in fact been leaning near him too often since his return and their rather spectacular non-greeting, told him to stop trying, that they would come around to realizing CA trouble didn't mean he was a closet Christian, and certainly not a terrorist trying to overthrow the government, not the House they knew, that it would pass. He walked away and left the oncologist talking to air.

He went to see the morgue attendant. A woman he had never seen and who had the look of a Nazi concentration-camp guard down pat told him over a spread-open body that the former attendant he was looking for had been arrested by CA shortly after they had come for House himself, the morgue's role in the spiriting away of Cameron having become apparent. The guy hadn't been back since. He sat down on a revolving stool and stared at the floor for a long time. The attendant had been a kid, a twenty-something, who had thought it would be a riot to screw over CA when he had suggested it and liked the cool thousand it would earn him just to hide someone in a body-bag on short notice, get the bag in the van and drive it off somewhere where the person could be let out. He felt sick to his stomach. The woman said something to him as he left, but he didn't hear it, the elevator like the hum in his veins screaming for more numbness, and when he got to his office and found only two Vicodin left in the bottom of the mortar, meaning he would have to go to Wilson for a scrip, the deserting bastard, the threads holding him broke. He hurled the bowl at the door, blind, and said deserter just entering ducked. They stared at each other.

"All right," Wilson finally spoke. "You've been on the receiving end of injustice now. They did their lawful best to hurt you, and you can be thankful they didn't do their unlawful best, but –"

"Which you can know nothing about what they did to me since you haven't even asked."

"Cuddy told me all she knew." Puzzlement at his anger was not something he got often from Wilson, but this time a lot of the anger was directed at the good doctor himself and it seemed to be taking a while to click. Wilson frowned. "Worse things have happened to people than four days of detox, House."

"Yeah, possibly happening to the kid from the morgue right now."

"Do you want to talk?"

"What, someone willing to talk to me? Oh be still my beating heart. Sure you want to be seen with me? I'm a Christian, you know. It's a fact, because I was arrested."

Wilson was still working it out. "You know, it's ironic really. You always pigeon-hole people –"

"That's because so many pigeons fit in the holes made for them."

"And now you're being pigeon-holed and you don't like it."

"Just fuck off." It was so simple and crass a new silence fell. Outside in the conference room Foreman entered, acknowledged them with a raised eyebrow and left.

"You know what your problem is?" Wilson finally said quietly.

"Finding someone to drive me home from jail?"

It clicked. "Is that what this is about?" The oncologist sounded tired. "Is this about me not being able to pick you up? Because if it's about me, then I'm out of here." He threw his hands up, his backing-out gesture. "Sorry I couldn't be there every _second_ for you, House."

"Every second? You haven't been there once in months!" Too loud for the small injustice done him. "Anytime anything has happened where I could have used your help you've made yourself scarce!"

Wilson was at the door. " –and I'm sorry about what they did to you."

"Oh, go back to your office and e-mail me your condolences."

In the door his deserter turned. "You know, self-pity undermines sarcasm. You should choose one or the other and stick to it." He left.

Sarcasm had deserted him too. An unsigned note on his desk on Thursday said _You're a liability to this hospital. Get out_. He was accustomed to hate but always before he had earned it. Ostracize me, he wanted to say, but not for something stupid like this. On Friday Lloyd Beese from Nephrology laughed in his face. "I always knew you were a twisted bastard," the other doctor snorted, "but now I've got proof." They stood in the dusky parking lot, the discussion House had forced upon Beese ostensibly about a liver surgery House's latest patient would need by the next day if the guy was going to live. He had no leverage. Beese's hand on the car door leaped back when he reached out to stop him as though the man had been electrocuted. "Don't touch me," the surgeon growled. The hate in his eyes was tinged with fear. "You and your Christian filth – you're sick. If you don't love this country, why don't you leave it? You and Cameron and Nealy, the whole bunch of you." The man bustled into his car and drove away. Something as stupid as this. It was December. All around the snow had begun to fall and he stood, collecting white hills on his shoulders and hair and wondering how he would make it back to the door of the hospital because everything had turned so slippery.

****

_Hole up on your days off_.

It was Ailyn's mechanism against the on and off of her life. The tiny walk-up on Beech in Trenton was a world she could step into and forget everything: her work that was either no work at all - anti-work - or the most important job in the world, depending on how you looked at it, forget the looks that some of the men – and all of the women – were giving her in the halls, forget the look on Greg House's face when she told him she was letting him go home. The one thing she couldn't allow herself to forget was Blenheim's stare, the distrust that lent his face a metallic sheen whenever he encountered her, as feelingless as an ATM but still scary. How on his shitlist she was. Her apartment sang with the things she loved and she dropped her snow-wet coat on the floor, made cinnamon cocoa and sat in the soft chair across from her bookshelves to study the notes she had made in the bar earlier. The contact had been a man named Rick whom she had met often, and who had been thrown by the black hair until she murmured "Wig" and told him she was being watched. He had been busy since they last met, showing her a photo on his cell-phone of a letter she had been tracing half her life and had thought destroyed, addressed to the then FBI in a handwriting she knew and listing names of people the letter-writer wished to warn the authorities about because they propagated violence in the name of Christianity. The letter was dated three years before Dirty May and it was proof that Michael Nealy had tried to expose the terrorists in his inner circle long before they terrorized. The letter had never appeared at his trial. She had copied down the names while she and Rick stuck their heads together over the cell-phone pretending to laugh over vacation photos. He had seemed so distracted over the wig, turning several times, that she had had to murmur "Stop staring at me."

He had done some of her work for her already, tracing the names back to their origins, though she could do more on the CA computers. _Kyle Henderson, Teddy Gaites. Darren Blackwell_. Nobodies, from nothing midwestern states, whose lives before they decided religion meant they could blow people up held no clues as to where they might be now. They might have blown themselves up in Dirty May or might have thrown it all over and be working at a Taco Bell; they certainly wouldn't be using their names anymore. She could look into it anyway, once she was back at work.

Her cocoa had grown cold. As she headed for the kitchen the doorbell rang. There were very few who knew where she lived. She hid the notepad with its names under the seat cushion and squinted out through the peephole.

Robert Chase looked terrible. He shivered in his thick overcoat as she locked the door again behind him. The shadows under his eyes made his face look pinker than usual. Flushed, she thought. He hadn't washed his hair. "It's my day off," she tried to joke. "Don't tell me this is about work." When he stammered and then almost tripped on the way to the sofa, she felt chilled. He might have been drinking, though she could smell nothing on him.

"- and I can't talk to Blenheim about it," he was saying. "He's already looking at me the way he looks at you." He didn't sit on the sofa, pacing between the window and the bookcase instead. She ruled out booze and replaced it with uppers, though he had never seemed the type to take drugs. His words slurred into one another. "If she was, then it was only because she needed treatment. And instep-, in_stead_ we drive her underground, straight into their arms." His pacing brought him near and she clutched his arm.

"Robert, _stop_. Have you taken something?"

He didn't seem to hear. "I think I was wrong," he half-whispered. It was the saddest tone she had ever heard. "I loved her. I _love_ her, and I'll never see her again. Tell me I didn't do the wrong thing."

He was listing. Like a gun going off it struck her what House had said. She had suppressed the moment her suspect doctor had walked out the lobby, not wanting to think about any of it, but now it rushed back in. "Robert, I think you're sick."

"Maybe we're condemning all these people who are good. Allison was a better person than I am –"

"There's something wrong with your brain." She had taken both his wrists, if only to keep him facing her, and she saw that the skin between his fingers was peeling off. Thick dry flakes that looked painful. He was sweating. His legs gave out and he sank to the floor, almost pulling her with him.

"Done combing innocent people," he mumbled.

She stepped across him and without thinking punched a number. "Princeton-Plainsboro?"

****

His office hadn't changed. She watched him for a moment before he sensed her presence and looked up.

Surprise, joy, fear – all gone too quickly to be certain of, yet it shook her. "Here to red-file me, Detective?"

"You were right about Chase," she told him. She approached and proffered the file Foreman had given her when she had told him she wanted to ask House herself, and when he didn't take it, she laid it on the desk. "He collapsed in my apartment last night."

"Ah, the young today. No stamina."

"He rang my bell at midnight. He was distraught about Cameron. I thought he was drunk at first."

He had begun to roll a pen back and forth on his desk with his palm as if cracking a boiled egg. He hadn't touched the file. "So you really thought," he said slowly, "that I would do this kind of favor for you and your partner, after what you did to me?"

_Take a deep breath_. "You were the first to notice Robert's symptoms. I thought you would care –"

"Right. When the last time I cared about a patient Reagan was president –"

" –care to _know_ what it was he had," she finished her sentence.

He stared at her. "I don't _care_ to know anything about either of you. I thought I made that clear when I walked out of CA. Sort of what sayonara means: 'Here's hoping to never see you again.'" Anger boiled beneath his voice. "But oh you come waltzing in –"

"I'm not here for myself, I'm here for Robert."

" – thinking you can demand anything you want!" The anger broke through. He was suddenly shouting. "What are you going to do, Detective - threaten me into caring? Is that it?" He stood and the pen rolled off the desk. If she had thought it was going to be easy she'd been a fool. Nothing was right. She felt light, papery. The slightest wind would blow her away and he was a hurricane. "What'll you do if I refuse this case – arrest me?" She tried to murmur a reply. "Easy enough for you, isn't it? You're the one in power. Except power doesn't work against disease, does it? Surprise ! – disease trumps your badge!"

She nodded, helpless. Disease trumped her badge.

"Can't issue a directive to make disease go away, can you! So what are you going to do, huh, order me to take the case?" It was the full force of him, to which she had never been exposed. She had to fight not to put her head down and close her eyes against the gale. _Keep looking at him_. "Because if you do, I should warn you – my mind doesn't work very well at gunpoint. I just might screw up. So go on, order me! _Go on!_ Since it's all so easy for you. Maybe I'll do you the favor because you've got nice tits!"

She found her voice. "It was very hard for me to come here."

The truth in it calmed the storm. They stared at each other for a long time. The staring became easy, an acknowledgement. "You've got guts," he finally said.

"I have to."

When he sat down and flipped open the file she wanted to collapse with her forehead on the desk as he once had. More than the fact that he was taking the case, it meant that in some way he forgave her for the arrest. She remained standing. He glanced at the first two lines in the file and closed it. "It's mercury poisoning. Case solved. So, sayo-"

"No it isn't," Foreman said. The black man had appeared in the door behind her. "Tox screen's been done. Merc's only slightly elevated."

"His hands are turning into confetti."

"The desquamation could be a contact allergy –"

"With neurological symptoms?"

"Unrelated. Psoriasis or lichen planus –"

"But pink disease fits better. Since he's so pink-cheeked anyway you might not notice."

They talked around her as though she barely warped space.

"Kawasaki's?"

"Too rare in adults. And where's the fever? No, it's a toxin. You're going to search the house."

It was an order she heard so often directed at herself that it took a second to realize House was still talking to Foreman. "You search people's homes?" she asked.

He grimaced. "Now don't get all territorial on me, Detective."

"I can get the key from Chase," she told him.

"Sorry, not our modus operandi. The patient is never on the need-to-know list."

"Well, I can get you in at least. I've got a lock-aid in my car –"

"What – let you get in ahead of Foreman and hide all those neatly ironed blazers of yours hanging in the closet?"

"I'm not sleeping with Robert Chase, you know." He wasn't looking at her, suddenly intent on the file. "I don't know where you got that idea."

"Foreman can dickey the door. He's done it a hundred times – and that was before he came to work here." Ignoring her disclaimer. "Look, the reason I'm taking the case is to get you off my back, in case you didn't understand that. And out of my sight. Remember that conditioning you put me through? I'm already feeling nauseous, so –" He waggled his fingers in a get-lost gesture.

It hurt. "Thank you," she said. It seemed the right thing to say. Foreman was already bustling into his coat. House rolled his eyes.

****

In the muted room on the third floor Robert lay in the bed looking miserable while a nurse bustled around him. "There's nothing wrong with me," he told them both. Ailyn exchanged a weary smile with the nurse. "I've got a needle in my arm and a tube coming out my…" His wave toward his nether regions was embarrassed. "This can't be necessary."

"Dr. House ordered a 24-hour urine," the nurse informed him. She sounded like it wasn't the first time she had told him. Ailyn had spent an hour trying to get down a cafeteria lunch that lived up to its reputation as hospital chum, imagining Foreman going through Robert's house, imagining any moment that Greg House would walk in for his own lunch. Wondering if that would make her fly apart. She had decided the only place in the building she had no chance of running into him was his patient's room.

"Dr. House will find out what's wrong with you," she told Robert. "Let him do his work."

"He hates me. He hates all of us. D'you know how easy it would be for him to make some innocent mistake and poison me? I wouldn't put it past him at all."

The nurse spun on him. "You should be grateful he took your case!" She shook a needle like a scolding finger while she spoke. They both stared. "Do _you_ know what kind of trouble you've caused him? Two doctors on the board moved to have him fired last week. That's what I heard at least." She seemed to realize the needle was silly and put it down. "You associate someone with Christians and people will hate them for it. And you CA people are the cause of that."

Chase twitched. "Sounds more like colleagues who hated him anyway using the chance to get rid of him." He twitched again and frowned.

"I'm just saying he didn't have to take your case." The nurse turned away. "He had every reason not to."

"Cool, huh?" At House's voice near Ailyn's ear she suppressed a start. He had come up behind her. Electricity raced down inside her. "Now I'm the tragic hero," he murmured. _Don't ask what he's doing here_. It was part of the puzzle of him – he hated the patient so he showed up in the room. Maybe he liked to watch the suffering. He moved to Chase's side.

"Hmm, twitches and tremors. That's what little Aussies are made of." Chase's hands were visibly shaking now. House pincered his wrist to measure his pulse and Chase snatched it back.

"Robert," Ailyn spoke, "he may be the only one who can help you. You've got to trust him."

"She's right, you know. When you're at death's door, I'm the one who'll pull you through."

"Just keep your hands off me!"

"Been skipping out on our anger management classes? See?" House turned to Ailyn. "That's why I'm such a better person than the two of you. I harbor no resentment whatsoever." The nurse scowled at them all and then stared at the edge of the bed. "Oh," she said. A trained, subdued _Oh_. She lifted the urine bag.

The fluid inside was brown.

For a moment they were silent watching it slosh. Behind them midday voices from the hall filtered in. "Well," House said, "our little Aussie's brown-bagging it. Imagine that, not even his kidneys like him enough to put out for him. This is not good ne_w_-"

Chase punched him in the stomach. The force the detective needed to twist his arm across himself tore the drip from his hand and half threw him from the bed. House doubled over, shoved back against the counter, scattering shiny steel instruments. He raised the cane like a golf club, ready to return the assault. She lunged between them. The cane hovered above her, and for a second she was afraid he wouldn't care who he hit, then it lowered. "Come _on_, Mom," he gasped. "Let the boys finish. I'm getting tired of this one-punch-at-a-time – at this rate he'll have me beaten up in a year." She could feel Chase's weight at her back as he tried to stand and shove her aside at the same time. He was moaning, "You _poised_ – me – poisoned – you _dastard_ -" "We'll step outside now," House went on. "This would be a good time for me since _your kidneys are failing_." The last directed at Chase who murmured, "I can't feel my feet," and collapsed in Ailyn's arms as she turned to catch him. She tried to wedge him against the bed and saw the brown stain across the sheets. The nurse had not been quick enough to catch the catheter he had lost when he launched himself from the bed. Half the bag's contents was on the floor and spreading. Chase's eyes rolled up in his head and she gave up on getting him in the bed, letting him slip to the floor and snatching a pillow to cradle his head. She turned quickly enough to catch House's shuttered gaze. "Either you like him a _lot_ or you missed your calling as a nurse."

"I don't like to see people in pain," she told the floor.

"Could have fooled me." She watched his sneakers leave for the door. "Well, at least we have some new symptoms to diddle with. Too bad Cameron's not here to hold the patient's hand, but you're doing fine. Hey, Foreman!" The neurologist had appeared in the door, still in his overcoat. Foreman pushed past his departing boss to help her and the nurse lift the patient back onto the bed. She watched Robert's pale face against the sheet for a moment. His left hand was still a fist. "What's going on?" he mumbled.

"Too much," she told him.

****

"Emotional instability."

It was a risk she took, she knew, going back to his office. The risk of being told by a look that she was acting like a stray dog on his heels, the risk that it would send her home to cringe on the soft chair and hate herself for letting him get to her. She might have been a ghost walking into the conference room, so little did it draw his attention. A wraith that could have walked through the chair there instead of pushing it aside to lean against the counter. He didn't look away from the whiteboard where he was listing symptoms. Foreman had returned from his search with nothing.

"Tremors."

The conference half of his office smelled like bad coffee. Allison Cameron had probably been the only one who knew how to make a good pot. "So you're still on the case, in spite of what he did?" she asked him. The image of him doubled over with Chase's fist in his middle wouldn't leave her. It was a way, she supposed, of telling him she admired him for not resenting it. No response except for scratchings on the whiteboard.

"Numbness in the extremities."

"Which is always heavy metal," Foreman intoned.

"Maybe. The heavy metal I know usually presents as numbness in the ears." He was ignoring her and she perhaps deserved it for even approaching him again, but she wanted to scream. She looked out the window instead.

"Unexplained anger."

A voice at the door interrupted. "Who says it's unexplained?"

"The guy with the pocket protector's got a point. By the way, do you see him too, Foreman, or am I hallucinating?"

Foreman frowned. "Wilson's there. And so is she."

"I just don't remember calling in oncology for a consult."

She kept her eyes on the window.

From the door came a sigh. "I get it, House – you don't want to talk to me. But the guy could have cancer. Paraneoplastic –"

"The guy _is_ a cancer. I still don't need the Amazing Disappearing Wilson in here to tell me things I already know."

"Well, then _you_ can tell CA when he dies." James Wilson's despondency emanated from him. She didn't have to look at him to hear it. Here we are, she thought, following him around like dogs, both longing for the affection of an asshole. She glanced at the door in time to see the oncologist leave.

House spoke to Foreman as though nothing had happened. "You said you found nothing in the house?"

"Other than me almost killing myself tripping on the basement stairs, we learned nothing. I searched every inch."

"It could be anything. You said he liked seafood. What about vibrio vulnificus?" He glanced at her. "No, not a type of dildo." It was the first time he had acknowledged her presence.

"No gastroenteritis."

"Pheochromocytoma?"

"Could fit. Heart rate and BP are up. And there's the anxiety. I could biopsy a kidney for amyloid deposits."

From the corner of her eye she could see his fingers rub the edge of the whiteboard as he concentrated. "If that urine of his wasn't being mopped up from the floor right now - we needed that sample." She couldn't take her eyes from the movement, the slow strokes her besieged mind compared to a lover caressing skin, while he stood hipshot, thoughts plunged into the symptoms written before him. "We won't get any more piss out of him – or not enough - if he has to go to dialysis." She realized she was going a little crazy. "I suppose we could wring out the mop."

****

Standing hipshot was his specialty. A kind of meditation, she supposed. She found him in the evening standing outside Chase's room while his neurologist prepped the patient for dialysis. He stood so close to the glass that his breath fogged it, the intensity of it somehow familiar. Comforting. He rubbed his thigh, unconsciously, she guessed, and stopped when he sensed her beside him.

"Hurting?" A stupider remark she could not have come up with. She wanted to kick herself.

"Depends on who's asking."

"Don't you just – take more of the pills?"

"They can only do so much." He glanced her way. "Maybe I'll go home and read my bible, pray a little. That ought to get rid of it."

For a while they watched Foreman work behind the glass. Robert looked confused, and more than a little frightened. Finally she spoke. She tried to put her true self into her voice. "I do _not_ like to see people in pain."

"Then why are you following _me_ around?"

She couldn't refute that logic. "I – I didn't know it was all the time." It sounded wrong. "The pain, I mean. You never said –"

"You people don't seem to think much about what it means to be handicapped in general, do you?"

She wouldn't tell him how much she had thought about it in the months since she'd met him. "No."

"When everything's hard to do, everything has to be thought through first." He seemed not to be instructing her as much as talking to himself. "It makes you practical. The reason I'm not the one to go searching the houses, for instance. If it was me who tripped on the basement stairs, I would break…my…neck." His words had slowed. Wonder crossed his face. For a second she thought something had happened in the room but she could see nothing wrong. He was staring away, at a place she couldn't see.

"Foreman, you idiot." he growled. Though he could not have heard him through the glass, the neurologist looked out at that moment, a telepathy acquired perhaps from being glared at so often by his boss. House pushed past her almost violently and threw open the glass door. "You tripped on the basement stairs," he barked. In loudness it was worthy of a circus ringmaster.

Foreman stared. "So?"

"You didn't feel the need to explore why that might have been?" House jabbed his way to the bedside.

"The light was out. I tried the switch. What does this have to do with a patient's kidneys failing?"

Ailyn had followed him in. "Robert's sick because he hasn't got a light in his basement? Do you think he tripped too?"

Foreman was waving his hand in disgust. "We ruled out a blow to the head, House."

"Where there's no light, it's because the light is broken." House looked triumphant. "And what kind of light do most people have in their basement?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Fluorescent." He spun to her. "What was the very first diagnosis I made?"

"Mercury poisoning," she answered.

He looked slightly surprised then appreciative, and she realized he hadn't expected her to remember. "Right –"

"His mercury's not that high –"

"Because it wasn't a whole-blood test. And we never got that 24-hour urine. It's still circulating in him." He turned on the patient now. "Did you break your fluorescent basement light recently?"

Chase looked more confused than ever. His words were slurred. "I – I was carrying a ladder and hit it. Four days ago. But I vacuumed it all up. I wore doves - _gloves_." He raised his peeling trembling hands to study them and dropped them again.

"And where did you dispose of the vacuum-cleaner bag?"

The patient blinked. "I – I didn't."

"Mercury vapor," Foreman muttered. "I never thought to look."

House was nodding. "Here I've been sending you to houses all this time and you haven't been checking the vacuum cleaners." To Chase he said, "Mercury's not just that cool silver stuff. It puts out vapor. Vacuuming it up just distributed vapor throughout the air. And every time you came near the bag after that you were inhaling more. What about your clothes? Did you wash them?"

"I didn't get any on my clothes, I was sure."

"Again – _vapor_ sort of implies invisible. You put the same clothes on the next day, you were absorbing even more. You already had elevated mercury levels from being a fish-lover – not a comment on your skills in bed, or wait, maybe it is – and then the vapor was like the icing on the cake. Your central nervous system's the first to go, then the brain, making you goofier than you already were. Next up are your kidneys, which fail early, maybe from an inherent weakness, and leave more than usual circulating in your bloodstream. Mercurialism by bioaccumulation. Usually associated with marine life, but here we have it in a prime human sample. What do you think, Foreman – can I get an article out of this? A proof for bioaccumulation of goofiness." He reared away from the patient, his work finished.

"Is that it?" she asked. Chase was frowning monstrously, the last of his concentration shot. "Does that mean he has to stay this way?"

"Oh no, we'll flush it out of him," House told her. "It's called chelation therapy. A very simple method – think Drano. He'll be as good as new, if good is the appropriate word."

"I'll get the whole-blood first –" Foreman had already started for the door.

"You'll get the chelating agent."

"If you're wrong, if it's a different metal, chelation could increase the toxicity."

"Do it anyway. If I'm wrong, it will give them the chance to arrest me again after the malpractice suit comes in. And if I'm right – well -"

His eyes met hers for a moment too long. "It means – with any luck – I won't ever see either of them again."

****

The tall man beside his bed was gazing down at him without pity and had been for a while, he sensed. He felt he had slept through a cataclysm he couldn't remember. He felt he should know the tall man's name.

"It will all come back to you." As though the man read his thoughts.

He had been woken by a kiss, though he knew it was no one real or present in the room. A dream. A woman's warm hand on his arm, brown hair against his skin. It hit him all at once and he tasted acid. The dark hospital room was suddenly heavy.

The man named Gregory House saw it too. "Just like that."

"You…" His own voice wouldn't work. "You're…still in contact with her."

The doctor's face lost the little expression it had held. For a moment he was still. "No."

"But she might contact you again. It's possible." The turmoil inside him, the nausea ever since her disappearance, was spilling over. It was the only explanation for entrusting the man in front of him with his dilemma, as though the doctor who abjured all feelings were an empty vessel he could pour himself into. "Please. If she does, you have to tell her for me – I was wrong."

"Look, this is the mercury talking. It will take a while to flush it all. You're still emotionally unstable."

He shook his head and it left him dizzy. "I know what I'm saying. Allison was misguided, but she was right about so many things. She said we should stop bothering you –"

"Wow, I hope that means you're getting off my case. In more ways than one."

"It means I'm getting off all of it. I can't do it anymore. It was what she wanted, the last night, when she confessed." The last night. He had told no one the details, the screaming rage he had thrown at her for hours, the arguments until they had both collapsed with their backs against the kitchen cabinet, incapable of thought. "She wanted me to quit my job for her. Please –" House stared down at the hand that gripped his wrist now. "You're my only connection to Allison – you have to tell her."

"The lines are down." He extricated his wrist. "Plus McCullough won't like it. She'll have to get used to a new partner. Where to hang her clothes in his closet, for instance."

He had no idea what House was talking about. He felt more tired than he ever had in his life. He had been poisoned unwittingly. The toxicity draining from him left him with nothing, only the memory of Allison Cameron and the need to reinvent himself. He closed his eyes. "Tell her I was wrong." When he opened them again, the doctor was gone and he was left alone with the shadows.

****

"_So he's a good person. Living by his own rules. Not a borrowed moral code, but his own."_

"_You may have misinterpreted his reasons for wanting to help your partner."_

"_You mean, it was just an interesting case to him? But the interesting case punched him in the stomach. He could have refused after that. Like the nurse said, he had no reason to do Robert a favor."_

"_Have you considered that his reason may have been to do you a favor?"_

"_He hates me. I make him nauseous. I'm too ironed for him. Stop laughing."_

****

(A/N: Not much in the way of the plot moving forward this time, but I promise more in the next one)


	9. I Remember When I Lost My Mind

**Aberrant – Chapter 9**

9. I Remember When I Lost My Mind

Stay with me. I'm cold.

Imprisonment, addiction, love. He wrote the words in the steam on the mirror. After an hour they faded away and revealed, in the light, Stacy's face, chiseled with determination. He turned to her because she wasn't there. Stay with me, I'm cold. For weeks he became a great doctor, solving cases so knotty no one else even realized they were cases, but who would solve his? Doodling Stacy's face on his calendar pad, wondering why he was thinking of her so often, recalling those famous last words of his (_Stay with me I'm cold_), words he might as well not have said to her at all as she walked out the door, he realized she was a symptom. He had died after that, undiagnosed. He realized the date on the calendar pad was two weeks old. Like a maniac he tore at the date sheets, each fluttering away to reveal the next like time passing in an old movie, an archeologist digging down to the present.

"A funny guy." (The cashier in the corner market said, leaning over her register to watch him hobble out until her boss told her it would really be funny when he fired her.)

"A great doctor." (Nodded the other doctors sagely and he was rehabilitated. An asset again, not a liability. No more notes asking him to leave.)

Then fireworks went off, an intermittent stream of pops and reds and greens beyond his apartment window. It was New Year's Eve. People laughed in the street. They had finished exchanging gifts, surprising the kids, gritting their teeth against relatives they saw only once a year, a culmination of a month of stressful shopping, baking, lights strung on roofs, trees brought into homes (a custom so ancient and silly he thought it bordered on a religion itself), every conversation all about the stress because if you weren't stressed out it meant you had no one to buy gifts for. He had no one to buy gifts for. The people pouring out into the street at midnight could relax now and they did so hysterically. The pops sounded like distant gunshots, which they might have been. Celebrating birth, the birth of a new year, as though time were a god. He leaned out, the shutters thrown wide, to watch and a woman on the sidewalk below hugged her child to her like a lover. A man kissed his wife like a child. A film of snow lay on the windowsill and he tried to write words in it, but when the breeze rose to erase them, the filaments of snowflakes fluttering, it was suddenly too much. His vision backed up, choking him. He stumbled away, doubled over, eyes closed but it was there on the back of his eyelids, the soft tickling sensation, and he found the phone blind and punched in the number. _Please pick up_. The receiver clicked. He could hardly get it out. "The…the fur."

A second's pause, then Wilson said, "I'll be there in ten minutes."

They sat in the kitchen. At some point his breathing had calmed. Wilson had a bottle of vodka liqueur that tasted like good sex (sex in the snow maybe, it was so chilled) and had cost him a mint. "Did you even try to find out what was happening to me?" he finally asked. Wilson looked as though he was in the mood not to hold it against him. It had to be asked. It had burned inside him.

Wilson studied him for a moment. "You'd been fairly reticent with me about all of it from the start. Never telling me Cameron was the contact you met in the park," (_I was going to_, he almost said) "- or that you had plans to help her escape." He sighed. "Look, Cuddy had her suits on it. There's that 30-day encapsulation rule, so Christian Affairs wasn't obliged to tell us anything, and the lawyers said it was useless to try."

"Did you go storming into the headquarters in Trenton demanding my release?" The little sarcasm he could muster felt like post-nasal drip. "Did you brandish a gun and wave legal briefs? Did you call your local congressman?"

Wilson looked straight at him for a long time. "I couldn't walk in there," he finally said, in a voice he was sure he had never heard before. So trembly it made him tremble. "Those people scare me."

Long ago, in a summer gone record hot, Wilson had been driving him to his leg therapy when they had had an accident. A red Camaro had run a stop sign and they had plowed into its right side just hard enough to trigger the Buick's airbags. Not a leisurely balloon inflating as movies would have one think, it was a punch in the face out of nowhere, that died instantly again as the bags deflated. When he recovered and looked over, Wilson was clutching his arm as though it was broken. His driving glasses were bent. The bags hung in front of them like huge spent condoms and Wilson was turning, dazed, to his seatbelt, muttering something about smoke and the car being on fire. "That's vapor from the airbags," he told him, unsure of whether he had spoken and then the driver of the other car had gotten out, a kid in a football jacket, and rage overtook him. They had made him late for screwing his girlfriend, the kid's condescending smile said, and didn't these older farts just get rattled by anything could we get this over fast, and he was out of the car somehow, his leg screaming protest, had the kid up against the front of the Camaro, with the image of Wilson loopy still sparking in his head, he was yelling obscenities, gearing up to punch or pretend to, because Wilson was in no condition to and someone had to scare the kid, and suddenly Wilson stood beside him with his hand on his arm saying, "It's _all_ _right_, House." The oncologist's crooked glasses hung half off his face. He was still dazed but he was pulling himself together, putting all his strength into keeping his fly-off-the-handle buddy from causing a scene, and it had struck House in that second, deep down where epiphanies start, how perfectly they complemented each other, the anger and the acceptance, that it was how they cared for each other, his shouting all for Wilson's sake and Wilson's calmness all for him, that that had to be nourished. He looked across his kitchen table now and remembered the hand on his arm. If Wilson, the usually centered half of their duo, had some irrational fear of Christian Affairs, he could be strong enough himself to accept it.

When he nodded Wilson visibly relaxed.

"You should have just said. I was looking for a new friend there for a while."

"No luck?"

He grinned. "Being ostracized is not pretty."

"You know, I've figured out why people hate you." Wilson propped his legs on a chair and leaned back. "I had this prof in med school who would often say 'Happy is the man who has found his calling'. Meaning us, wanting to be doctors so we could do good. And every time he said it I thought, Well, happy is the addict who just found a bag of heroin too, where's the difference? The difference is, you can be addicted to your work if it's not purely for your own pleasure. Society condones that kind of addiction because it's in service to them. Manic doctor doesn't give up until he solves case, et cetera. A life is saved. It's when people see that it _is_ purely for your own pleasure that they start to hate you. The fact that you personally are fascinated by the case but don't give a crap about the patient."

He liked the insight. "It makes it too obvious it's all for me and not for them."

Wilson nodded. "It reveals what we all know but don't want to admit – that there's no such thing as selfless service." He watched the plumes of fireworks explode beyond the window. "It should have been foreseeable really." He seemed to be talking about something else.

"What?"

"I mean…you've always stayed away from politics. But the one time you're forced to confront it, this whole conflict about Christianity, it gets all out of control. Most people have had to come down on one side or the other before this, or they're like Cuddy – who would go along with anything for the sake of her hospital and so has no inner conflict. What the country's become doesn't interest her."

"Realpolitik."

"If you will. But for someone like you, who goes against convention purely on principle – well, I'm just saying, in hindsight it's clear that once you became involved in something like this, an issue that has no right or wrong, that you'd beat your head against the irrationality like a wall – insist on visiting Nealy again, insist on helping Cameron – just beat your head against it until it broke you."

"Hello – I'm still all in one piece here. Okay, there's a piece missing, but CA had nothing to do with that."

Wilson studied him. "What did they threaten you with?"

He shrugged. "Nothing more than a course of Norxylam and the MMPI."

"You're kidding. Wait, don't you have to have a personality before they can give you a personality inventory test?"

"It would have scaled my Christianity potential."

"The other scales would be more interesting. You'd score as an extreme outlier on just about every one." Wilson had begun to coo into his vodka at the thought.

"Now don't exaggerate –"

"Let's see. There's the Ego Strength Scale –"

"Which I personally set a new record for."

"The Dominance Scale –"

"Did I invite you here?"

"The Addiction Potential Scale –"

"I am _not_ addicted –"

"The Repression Scale, appropriately. Oh don't give me that look. All that repressed bitterness –"

"How dare you suggest my bitterness is repressed? Haven't you been paying attention?"

"I assumed we'd all just been seeing the tip of the iceberg."

They sat in easy silence for a moment, contemplating the iceberg. The sounds from the street had faded.

"There's something I need you to see." He leaned past his cane dangling from a drawer handle and drew a sheaf of papers out that had been hidden under old recipes left by Stacy. "Nealy had this nutty theory last time I saw him and I like nutty, so I went looking. I found it on microfiche first, but they wouldn't make copies for me. It took me till last week to track down these print copies."

Wilson had spread them over the table for perusal in doctor fashion. "These are clinical studies on clozapine and Norxylam. So?"

"Look at the tables on each. The numbers in the chemical analyses." He could see his friend seeing it. "They're _exactly the same_. No studies on two drugs that are supposed to be acting on different parts of the brain could come up with the same results down to the last decimal like that."

"You're saying they didn't like the Norxylam results and just copied old clozapine ones in?"

"I'm saying Norxylam _is_ clozapine."

"That's crazy."

"We live in a crazy world." He watched Wilson's eyes flick back and forth between the studies. "Nealy had symptoms of myocarditis. I bet if we had a blood sample we'd see that he has agranulocytosis too. Typical side effects of clozapine. And it's being given to people who are not schizophrenic at all. It's no wonder the FDA never approved Norxylam for general release. All those doctors dispensing it in those restricted government camps are probably bought off."

Wilson had the wits to get right to the point. "What are you going to do about it?"

"What is there to do? I could get hold of some Norxylam and test it. But what then? No one could go public with this. They would just be suppressed."

"_You_ could. If every doctor in the world were bought off, you'd still-"

"Please don't. I know my reputation. Okay, so I bang out an article exposing it and then what – get carted off in the middle of the night and hung up by my two typing fingers for a lesson? No thanks."

"If this is true, it's maybe the biggest scandal in medical history." Wilson's thoughts were etched deep. All kinds of things were crossing his face. "Saunder-Glesco makes Norxylam, right? They're the only makers and they rake in a fortune on it."

He shrugged. "I tried to get some numbers on people who have died under anti-theic treatment – see whether the rate of myocarditis or agranulocytosis is high – but it's all been obviously fudged."

"The way I know you, you couldn't sit on something like this and –" Wilsons's pinched voice trailed off. "They really got to you, didn't they?"

In the long silence House stood and closed the window. A wisp of snow was blown inward as he did and he watched it melt on the counter. The relief at having told someone was all he needed.

"Look." Wilson shifted. "When we're at work tomorrow, I can look into getting hold of some Norxylam –"

"I'm not going in tomorrow."

"Cuddy's got you down for clinic."

"I'm not going in. I'm sick. Couldn't you tell when I called you?"

"The last time you had any sick leave left was last May."

"I'll call in dead."

The doorbell rang.

He instantly stuffed the papers back in the recipe drawer.

"Expecting company?"

He left Wilson in the kitchen and went to eye the peephole, then rested his head against the door for a moment. The heat pushing out at his skin was an anomaly, but he had no time to analyze it. He opened the door and let Ailyn McCullough in.

She was casual in jeans and her sheepskin jacket, half-open. Below the jacket she wore a narrow tunic loose enough at the neck to reveal pale collarbone, and behind it all the usual braid. She looked uncertain and even more so when she saw Wilson standing in the door of the kitchen.

"I – I'm sorry. I didn't know you had company. Dr. Wilson?" She nodded in his direction.

"You two know each other?"

"They were very thorough in questioning everyone about you back when this all started," Wilson told him.

She pursed her lips. "I – wanted to talk to you about something, Dr. House."

Wilson assured them both he was just leaving and slipped back into the kitchen to get his coat.

"Don't leave me here alone with her."

"Hey, don't creep up on me like that. And why are we whispering?"

"I get it that CA scares you, but you don't have to leave. I don't know what McCullough wants –"

"Look, from the way she keeps following you, I'd say she wants you."

"They've told her to keep after me –"

"No, no. She's obviously got the hots for you, House. Don't you think even CA agents have a sex life?"

"Not this one. Her only erogenous zone is her pistol holster."

"Hurt me with something hot if I'm wrong. I really think she likes you. Maybe if you offered her a small token of your esteem –"

"Would you please?"

Wilson left quickly, remembering to grab his vodka bottle. He nodded at McCullough as he passed her, then made wild kiss moues behind her back, aimed at them both, before closing the door. They were alone.

She approached to the middle of the room and he stayed by the window. "Here to harsh my mellow, Detective?"

"I came here because I want you to know something."

"You want to thank me again for doing my job."

"No, I want you to thank me for not doing mine."

It was surprising enough to make him turn. He hadn't planned on looking at her because he knew his eyes would go to her mouth, the softness there puckered against the chill. Damn Wilson.

"If you knew our usual procedure, you would know how easy you got off," she was saying. "And that was because of me."

"So in lieu of the torture I didn't go through, I have to stand here listening to you now."

"Yes." Some passion caught at her voice. "_Yes_. It's the least you can do for me having made sure you weren't taken to that basement room you know nothing about. Or worse yet – flown off for a one-night stand in a little place we call the B&B." The mention of a one-night stand hit too close to his thoughts and he looked away. "You really don't know how close you were, do you? You can't imagine it, no one ever does until it's happening to them. I've been there, I have to be, whether I believe in it or not. The men do the dirty work, but I have to be there to cheer them on, so I've _seen_ it –" She seemed to be working toward a rage not directed at him. His veins felt like ice. The vodka that should have warmed him had chilled him.

"I don't want to hear about your _job_, Detective!"

"Maybe you need to hear it! Maybe you need to know what you missed out on – which could still happen, my boss could reopen your case tomorrow and leave me out of the loop! Yes, I regret what happened to you –"

"Oh, your only regret in life is that you weren't born into Hitler's Germany."

"- but it's nothing compared to what happens in those soundproof rooms!" Her voice was so ragged it sounded like a different person, a teenager perhaps, ravaged by the unfairness of the world. "They piss themselves and I have to shower afterward so the smell won't be on me!"

The sordidness of it seemed too large for the apartment. "I'll cry for you if you promise to leave."

"And then I have to watch you mope around me as though I did you a terrible disservice! I couldn't say anything while you were treating Robert, but you could acknowledge what I got you out of, be grateful –"

"_But I'm not grateful!_ What do I know - maybe it was worse _because_ of you. Maybe if it wasn't for you, Detective, I wouldn't have been arrested! Who says you weren't pushing to get me booked into your B&B –"

"I _fought_ for you! Do you really think I would have wanted something like that to happen? You think I could have watched them do those things to you? I couldn't let that happen to you - I wouldn't have been able to _stand_ it! Not to _you!_"

The _you_ floated to the middle of the room and burst. It was like waking from a dream. When he turned, the color of her eyes had darkened, arctic ice all melted to tears that would hang forever without falling. She hadn't meant to say it. She stood like a trapped animal, paralyzed, then spun and walked to the door until her hands touched it in a blind grope and she stopped. _I'll cry for you if you promise to stay_. He was limping to her before he knew it, stopping the same way she had, as though her back were a wall he ran up against. Her braid lay before him and he touched it, ignoring the tremor that stiffened her shoulders, then lifted it to his lips. Softer than he would have ever expected, with the scent of the winter she had brought in still woven in it, snow and wood smoke, and he moved his lips down it because it didn't count as touching her did it, a thing apart from her; not skin against skin, yet. His hand found her shoulder, the thick jacket, and turned her to him while she resisted like a rusted bolt that didn't want to be loosened, frightened of being loosened, of flying apart perhaps, and then they stood facing each other with their bodies as close as though they had already been intimate. She wouldn't look at him. He raised his hand to touch her cheek and she batted it away, hard. When he tried again it became an absurd struggle; she was a bird flailing against glass, beating his arms down again and again whenever they rose to touch her, her face that still would not look up so close to his chest he could feel her warm breath where the top two buttons of his shirt were open, her face plunged there as though she needed the counterbalance to keep fighting. Her blows against his forearms hurt and he knew he would have bruises. He had never seen anyone want and not want so strongly. Their arms spiraled as if they danced. He got his hands on her wrists and everything flipped, she was suddenly limp, not a fighter at all, falling into him, and then his mouth was on hers. It was like the first touch of a drug, the moment his nerves felt the shimmy arrive. The taste of her exploded in his head. Her hands, freed, ran through his hair, a woman's hands in his hair, _this_ woman's, this tenderness he had had to fight his way to, tenderness such a rare occurrence for him it left him dizzy. His hands pulled at her hips and shaped her to him, to the bulge that had sprung to life there. He left her mouth to kiss her neck and eyes and nose, and rearing back saw in her face and closed eyes, with a shock, what his body could feel but refused to acknowledge - that she was still fighting. That every caress of her lips, the flutter of her fingertips on the skin at his throat, was in defiance of some monumental fear. "Please stop," she told him and placed her mouth on his again.

His hand was under her shirt, the skin there hot and taut, pushing him away with its very stiffness, and as he stroked upward she lunged back, the bird again suddenly, beating once at the air between them, then stilled, a hand over her mouth as though a word as revealing as the _you_ might still escape. "Ailyn, no," he murmured, but she had already turned and was fleeing out the door and down the stairs while his fingers snatched at nothing.

****

"They hammer nails through their hands. It's a kind of initiation rite and leaves horrible scars. So if you know anyone who wears gloves all the time, they may be a Christian."

The woman on the TV was forty-something and power-dressed. She seemed pleased that the documentary-makers had picked her out on the street to interview. Ailyn kept one eye on the screen over the bar and her other eye on the door while she sipped her virgin hurricane. Rick was late.

"You go once and they give you drugs in these little wafers." The man being interviewed now on the screen looked Ivy League. Like the woman he seemed blithely unaware that the film-makers were sympathetic to Christianity and were using their intelligent, random interviewees to show up the fatuity of the myths about Christians. "And these drugs just take away your initiative to try and break away from it, you can't make decisions, so you keep going to their services. Something like that date-rape drug."

A hand came down on her shoulder. "I feel like a fish out of water," the man told her and sat on the barstool beside her. It was the right code. She had never seen the man before.

"Where's Rick?" she asked.

"No one's seen him for a week."

She studied the stranger's suddenly earnest face. He was older than the small circle of people she usually worked with. To the view of anyone watching he spoke and acted casually, experienced at passing on information in public places. They might have been two colleagues discussing office politics. "He was looking into something for me," she murmured.

"Your list of names." The man nodded. She had traced one name until the trail petered out in Houston in April 1989, proof enough for her that the man behind the name had blown himself up. The other two were harder, slinking through name changes that led nowhere, and Rick had promised to sniff around. If something had happened to Rick – and the tingling across her skin that was her instinct said it had – then it was her fault. And it meant the leads were right. They were getting close to something.

"People are looking for Rick, Aimee," the man said. It was the name she used with them. "I'm sure he'll be all right." He seemed genuinely concerned, studying her face and black hair. The wig hadn't thrown him – he had walked right up and spoken to her. Only someone in contact with Rick since their last meeting would have known not to look for the blond they knew her as. "He mentioned the list to me," the man was saying, then turned to order a beer as though they planned to stay a while. "He didn't tell me the names, but if you'd like me to look into them..." His hands were thick and unmanicured. She felt sweaty, her scalp under the wig starting to itch. The list was in her pocket.

"No." She stood so fast she bumped into a couple passing behind her. The apologies and her brief search for her purse gave him time to register surprise. "Hey, slow down," he murmured, obviously puzzled at her distrust. His hand was on her arm. She could feel its strength.

"I'm sorry, I'll have to get back to you." She extricated her arm smoothly.

"Here, in two weeks." It was her regular rhythm with Rick. The new contact looked a little desperate, sorry not to have gained her trust. She smiled a non-promise and left without looking back.

She drove home by a circuitous route.

It was indecision that plagued her. It left a velvety lump in her throat, a fear of the future that turned to joy at the most inconsequential moments: the sun breaking through clouds, the smell of a male colleague's cologne. A flock of birds had risen from the steps of the municipal building where she went to do her research on Tuesday, making her turn and gasp because they were beautiful, because of the way their hearts beat with hers. Passersby gave her funny looks. She felt as though she were coming back to life after years of death. She had tried for the past week not to think of Greg House's hand rising to cup her face no matter how many times she slapped it down, of his lips on hers. Nothing was settled, everything worse in fact because she had run from him, but she had that moment, when she had said the word _you_ as though it meant the world and he had turned to look at her, shocked and...happy. It didn't matter that indecision had made her head for the door, then stop while his mouth moved across her hair, then fight his touch as though he were torturing her. She had suffered in one way or another from that indecision all her life, forced by her life to be distrustful of herself and everyone, the reason she couldn't trust the man in the bar. The birds rising into the sky had said that something new was starting. That she could live dangerously for once if it meant enough to her. That no matter who broke their silence first she would see Greg House again.

Locking her door behind her she took the list from her pocket in the kitchen and burned it in an ashtray, the names memorized anyway, and as she undressed for bed she stood naked for a long moment in front of the mirror, not touching herself, just looking, seeing what he would see.

****

"What would it mean if you had a dream where –"

Wilson groaned.

"- where the person in front of you was melting, but only on one side?"

"It would mean I need to reduce your scrip next time." Wilson finished winning the third foosball match in a row. "You've been so unconcentrated this past week, House, I could have started an affair with your new fellow and you wouldn't have noticed." House had taken the plunge and hired a replacement for Cameron, a stunning woman who had every man in the hospital drooling, Wilson and Foreman no exception, and then had proceeded to ignore her. He kept forgetting her name. This, more than anything else, seemed to disgust Wilson, watching him now with a shake of his head as they leaned to rest on the foosball grips. His buddy - in love or something like it - rendered unavailable for the off-color banter that made up so much of their conversation. Wilson sighed. "So you dreamed about your detective and she melted. I'm thinking some reference to a wicked witch here -"

"Not like that. Her right side was...dissolving, slipping away like a mudslide. The rest of her was okay." He could see his words affected Wilson on a level he had no insight into. Worry, and a kind of bombshelled fascination. The paralyzed watcher of a train accident. The guy had always been one to embolism over nothing, but maybe he _was_ acting insane. The need to see Ailyn McCullough again, to force her body against his while she weakened to him, had stripped his mind of every other impulse, only a skeleton of thought left, propping up that one moment of the kiss while he analyzed it over and over.

"Look," he told Wilson, "sometimes dreams mean something –"

"I'll tell you what dreams mean. They mean you're asleep."

"This dream was different." He gave up. "You think I'm in over my head, don't you?"

Wilson flicked a useless ball toward the goal without looking at him. "No, actually, to be honest, I think she is." He finally looked up. "I have two words for you. Cameron and Chase. Okay, three words. You were McCullough's job to start with, like Cameron was Chase's. Look where that got them. McCullough getting involved with you..." He seemed unable to finish the thought.

"Wasn't it you egging me on the other night when she came by?"

"That was a joke, House. Drunk friend makes lewd suggestion and you act on it? See how messed up you are lately?"

"It's good to know someone's worried about me."

"Maybe I just don't want another of those midnight calls when it all goes wrong."

It was going every which way but wrong. He had felt so giddy the past week he had begun to wonder if he might be manic-depressive, his manic phase showing up only now for the first time in his life, so that it appeared some modus strange and new to him, this desire to get out of bed in the morning, leaning in toward the day as though it were a friend with a secret to whisper in his ear. It was something others had words for, he had realized - anticipation, curiosity for life – phrases he had never attached meaning to as they lay outside his experience, but which now made him indecisive, looking forward to the moment he would see Ailyn McCullough again and yet frightened of her response, aware that he might have to bring that moment about himself if her fears – whatever they were – got the better of her. He was prepared to go after her, and for that he was not prepared.

In the afternoon he drove to Trenton and stopped outside the Department of Public Security building that housed Christian Affairs. He hadn't seen the front during his arrest, having been driven straight to the underground jail entrance, and had been careful to keep it at his back when leaving through the lobby with Cuddy. The place, he saw immediately, was designed to look friendly. It was set in a halfway busy area, a tree-lined avenue with a steady stream of cars, central but not too central. The inviting glass facade held signs cheerily announcing the various services within. Psychological counseling. Something called the Information Distributor Program, on Floor 3. All structured to make the helpful citizen's visit into the interior as pain-free as possible. Come have fun while you rat out your family and friends, he thought a sign should say. Visitors seemed in scant supply. Men and women in frowns and stark suits went in and out upon occasion, so obviously card-carrying CA members that he couldn't look at them. Now and then a balding man with a briefcase and a more expensive suit arrived, which told him some lucky son had been allowed a lawyer. The clenching feeling around his chest as he watched the entrance was what Wilson felt, he supposed, though in Wilson's case it was irrational, not based on any experience (that he knew of, his mind said, suggesting an interesting line of inquiry). His own case was different - he had rational reasons for the cold spear that gouged him when he thought of strolling in there to see Ailyn McCullough, cryo-ablation ice-mapping his heart until he thought he couldn't breathe. _They really got to you_. Had Wilson said that? He studied his hands on the steering wheel, their exact placement at two and ten o'clock. There had to be some trigger, a desire thick enough to make his legs work and propel him through the door. She won't come to you, a voice said, so you will have to go to her. He had to squint to see the dashboard clock and realized it had gotten dark. The cars on the street between him and the building sounded muted. He had sat there for three hours, letting the early winter evening wrap him in cold. _You feel like you're freezing, you moron, because you're freezing_. A laugh bubbled up in him. He would call it a test run. He would come back the next day and the next, until his courage got the better of him, which it would eventually. She wasn't going anywhere.

****

End of Chapter 9


	10. Hoping for the Best, Expecting the Worst

10. Hoping For The Best, Expecting The Worst

Charlie Dalton always took the chair in the break-room that let him keep an eye on the main detail room beyond through the half-open door, Ailyn had noticed, as though fearful of missing out on some unforeseen fun, a gag played on a colleague maybe, always needing to be where the action was even when he was on break. As she handed Charlie his coffee and stirred her own, she saw his eyes go wide. He looked back and forth between her and the room she couldn't see. "You're not going to believe who just walked –"

Doug Coombs stuck his head in the door, blocking Charlie's view. "You're wanted, McCullough. Guy's a glutton for punishment, if you ask me."

She glanced out past Doug. Greg House stood facing the bay window while the detail room bustled behind him. He stood unusually straight, one hand in the pocket of his leather jacket. With his cane he drew little circles on the floor in front of him, thoughtfully. He hadn't seen her.

"Said he had some information for you," Doug added, slipping in past her.

Charlie snorted. "Information, he calls it?" She rolled her eyes and grinned along with them, concealing the shaking that had erupted inside her. "Know what I think? I think our doctor's in love with little McCullough here."

They were both watching her now. "Think so?" she murmured, letting the grin tell them she was just one of the guys and wasn't it a big joke.

"You could pull a Sharon Stone on him."

"Nope. Sorry, wearing underwear today." The banter all on automatic as she gathered herself to step out the door.

"Hey McCullough, I've got information for you too when we get off work." Doug was snorting so hard he could barely get it out. "My information's bigger."

Their guffaws trailed her into the main room, loud enough to make him look up and see her approach. His glance at the room behind her said he knew he was the butt of some cop joke and didn't care.

"Dr. House. You wanted to tell me something?"

"Is there somewhere private we could go? Your office?"

"I don't have an office. I've got a desk." She pulled her eyes away from his haggard face, a difficult task. "There's probably –"

"Room three's free," said a cop at a desk close enough to hear. He was grinning too.

Room three was a mean sibling to the room he had been interrogated in before, built for rougher cases, with a restraint bar running along one wall, and she saw it appall him for a second before he sat down. She sat across from him. Silence gave her time to notice that his shirt was ironed and that small fact brought on the shakes again. She took a deep breath and huffed it out, put on an I'm-waiting expression.

"I'd like to ask you," (his slow voice flowed across her skin, generating heat), "if we could start over."

"You want to be arrested again." _Keep it on the joke level._

"Of course not. I want –" She realized he hadn't thought it out, that he had stood at an ironing board and ironed his shirt to impress her and hadn't planned for a moment what he would say to her. "I want for us to pretend we met...outside of all this. Like two actual people instead of characters in some crime drama. And just –" His shrug was embarrassed at his loss for words. "- start over. Back to the drawing board. I draw myself as a polite and likeable person and you – hell, I don't know. Let's just say you don't know me and I don't know you."

"Isn't that where we are? No need to go back to anything."

The wrinkling around his eyes was admiration. "Exactly." He bit his lip. "Ms. McCullough, would you have dinner with me tonight?"

She studied her hands. He could do that, take the weight off the week that lay between them, but she couldn't. She still felt it. _You're more courageous than I am_, she thought. He had come to her, ventured into the lions' den, punching through what was probably a debilitating fear of the place. If she wanted to match that courage, she would have to say what he wasn't saying. "I ran from your apartment. Like a..." She could think of nothing. A stray cat, spooked by the hand that wanted to pet it. _Ran from you_. He was nodding. "You think the appropriate response to that is to ask me to dinner."

"Just say yes." Irritation already building.

"I ran from you, I gave no indicaton that I wanted to see you again. I didn't contact you –"

"Look." Yes, it was irritation. "I understand there may be a tape recorder rolling in here, that you have to play this kind of game –"

"No."

" – but I'm not a player." He realized what she had said. "Was that a _no_ on the tape recorder or a _no_ on dinner?"

"I ran from your apartment." Unnecessary repetition. It was almost too easy to upset him. He had gone from suavely persuasive to argument mode in seconds.

"Yeah well, I have my theories on that, Detective." _Do you?_ "Three, in fact. One, I am still a suspect so you're afraid to get involved with me. Two, the kiss was really that bad. Three, you're just a frigid bitch who can't deal with your feelings."

She burst out laughing. She could feel it transforming her face, the hardness melting from the inside. It subsumed the shakes. His eyes wrinkled again, although he shook his head in confusion. "I'm sorry," she told him. "It's just – well, it's so obvious you came here to make nice to me and within seconds you're insulting me. Just shooting yourself in the foot. Sorry again – police jargon there."

"You don't want to know the doctor jargon equivalent." Joking with her, but his gaze lashed across her face gauging whether he might have really ruined his chances. "It's the Imp of the Perverse, I suppose."

"What is that?"

"I came across it during that research I did. A way to describe why people shoot themselves down, how we have this perverse tendency to sabotage our own good intentions all the time. Why we have a self-destruct button at all. The idea of the little demon sitting on your shoulder whispering in your ear. A Christian idea to start with if I'm not mistaken."

"There you go again."

He was nodding. "You'll have to cuff me to this now," indicating the restraint bar.

_I like you_. The thought warmed her. It was not a given, she knew, in-love not always implying like. You could obsess about someone sexually until your skin seared with desire and still not really like them, their jokes and habits, the way their mind worked. When you did, it was a fringe benefit. Desire morphing into something more like respect, admiration for the way the other person got through life, summed up in the sentence that fell into her head now: _I need to be more like you_.

"We can talk about it at dinner," she told him, her voice coming out a little too solemn. They were finalizing a pact.

He stared for a moment and then ran his finger along his cane that lay between them on the table and tapped it once, his signature on the deal, before standing.

****

The chutzpa it had taken to walk into the station had drained from him by evening. In his chutzpaless state he didn't know what to say to the woman who entered the restaurant and approached the table, and so he stood, which earned him a murderous look.

She wore earrings and a dress. He would have felt more comfortable if she had pointed a gun at him.

"Sit down. This is – what – you redrawing yourself as polite?"

"I have to start somewhere."

They ordered drinks. The waiter had a drastic lisp, and so he asked for a thingapore thling and then changed it to a thitrus thour. When the appalled waiter had left he looked back. Her eyes glinted.

"One and a half minutes," she murmured. "You stayed polite one and a half minutes. A personal best, I'm assuming."

"A guy's gotta have his fun. Just proves I'm a screwed-up bastard."

"So a screwed-up bastard and a frigid bitch. Should be a night to remember."

He felt himself coming apart. "I didn't mean that, you know."

"Yes you did. You mean everything that comes out of your mouth or it wouldn't come out."

"Contrary to appearance, I do engage my brain occasionally before I speak."

"Oh come on, Sponge Bob, stand up for what you say."

"You're not going to let me apologize, are you?"

"I'd love to give you practice at something you're not good at, but – no." She was studying him again, the cop scrutiny still lethally powerful under lashes dark with what he realized was a touch of mascara, the look puzzled, still working on a unified theory of him. "If I were a dominatrix I'd want you down on your knees apologizing, but I'm not and I don't."

"If you were, you'd have brought your whip and your handcuffs with the fur worn off from use."

"This is not about wanting to see you house-broken, pun intended – I don't want to hear you apologize, Greg."

He had to lift the menu to hide his quick smile, not the result of being let off the hook, but because it was the first time she had said his name. "Don't worry, I won't wuss out on you."

After dinner they walked the quiet streets. She seemed adept at forgetting the essentials, intent on the upper half of him, on his face as he spoke about anything – his parents, hospital politics, the freedom of sitting on a motorcycle – until he stopped to rest against a spiked fence.

"Is this hurting your leg?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you say so?" The question didn't stop her from continuing on past him. They had come to the ornate pedestrian bridge over Bane Creek and she moved up onto it. He followed. Below the arch of iron scrollwork, the dark water gurgled too quickly for the cold month, as though it intuited spring ahead and meant to hurry it.

"I've gotten into enough trouble being candid with you," he answered.

He leaned with his back to the railing, facing in toward her. For a long time they were silent. He reached out with his cane to hook her and she shoved it away. "I don't know how to come on to you," he admitted.

"You should probably wait for me to come to you again."

"A week and a half and counting."

She spun and leaned beside him against the railing. The silence turned comfortable. A man walking his wiener of a dog crossed the bridge and gave them an odd look. "We're thinking of jumping," House told him. "Can't make up our minds." The man tugged his coat around him like armor and bustled away.

"It's true, isn't it?" she murmured. "About the jumping."

Jumping had always been easy for him. He had a sudden vision of Cameron and Chase, as they might have stood in some similar moonlit corner, falling in toward each other, the same configuration of suspect and detective. Falling toward disaster and oblivious to it. Ailyn McCullough's hair smelled of spring. It was foolish and right.

"I don't say please often," he told her. His voice broke the stillness. She turned to him. "Please come back to my apartment with me."

She nodded speculatively, as though the idea had just occurred to her. "All right."

Then her hand was on his arm and steering him toward the street, shocking him just a little, the tenacity in the grip as appropriate to a cop arresting him as to a lover, while with her other hand she hailed a cab.

****

Ailyn had seen more of his apartment than he knew. The undisclosed search she had taken part in at the start of their investigation had revealed nothing about him but his skirting-the-edge drug abuse and a bent for collecting memories in small items: childhood odds and ends, a medal, a woman's bracelet, all hidden in a box under the bed. They were good in CA at putting things back and she doubted he knew anyone had ever been through the place. She pretended not to know where the kitchen was as she followed him through and watched him rummage up an already-opened bottle of wine and go on an archeological search for a clean glass.

She sniffed the bottle. "This is vinegar, Greg."

"Funny, it was wine just three months ago." He stopped in front of her, glassless, decided to sniff, and pondered. "Actually it smells more like the urine of someone with an E coli infec-"

"Okay. I don't need to know everything."

"Really?" He stood close. She realized he was nervous. Her own nerves had given way to a dizzying sense of comfort, of feeling at ease with him, the effect of leaning against a kitchen counter with anyone, she supposed, though she couldn't remember ever swaying as she did now between that easiness and the next moment's heart-squeezing anticipation, high and low, as if she had gone a little schizoid.

"I don't need any more stimulants, Greg." _How true_.

He looked almost scared. "I – just – haven't done this in a long time." He caught himself. "I mean – I've _done_ it." She felt a grin start. "I just haven't had to…"

"Had to do any seducing, you mean, because the woman was already paid for."

"Well, I usually pay afterwards."

She let out a long breath. "I've sort of gone the same route the past few years." She corrected herself at his astonished look. "Not _paying_. Just - picking someone out at a bar and…going for it because I needed it. It didn't matter that much who it was or what he was like." _Kick yourself_. "I mean – not that you're…" Another breath. "You should know, this isn't like that."

He had drawn closer, their clothes beginning to mate. He towered over her though she wasn't short, impossibly, as though his presence had expanded to fill the room, as though his arms were already around her.

"I'd kiss you now if I didn't think you'd hit me again."

"I'm not going to hit you."

He shot his cuff in a sudden movement to show the fading yellow bruise on his forearm. "Police brutality. What do you think? Should I file a complaint?"

"Just shut up and do it."

His kiss was silk. She fell into it. It was freedom at last, the freedom to run her hands through his hair, to touch his face, his own self-possession devolving into a moan, his hands leaving her waist to brush her lips and cheeks like fluttering birds.

"Let's take this to the bedroom," he finally rasped. His voice hummed along wires inside her. "You remember where that is from when you searched the place, don't you?"

**

In the bedroom he limped to the far side of the room to close the curtain and she found herself unzipping her dress and preparing to slip it off before he could get back to her, a habit she had developed because it made her little revelation easier. The nerves were back. He was a doctor, she told herself. He returned to face her with a quizzical smile. "Leave something for me to do."

"No, I –" Her fingers stopped his at the cloth on her shoulders. "I have to do this myself."

A dawning realization stilled him. Surprise and then understanding. "Ailyn, I know," he told her. Impossible because he couldn't. He couldn't know something no one in the world knew except two doctors and her ex-husband. The strangers she had slept with since. Not even those she worked with had any notion. He blinked at her, puzzled and terribly earnest. "I know about your mastectomy."

The air grew still. The sour knot that rose in her throat might have been rage. She was hugging herself like a prude suddenly, hugging her bra, the slipped dress a puddle at her feet. "How –" _All the nerves for nothing_. She couldn't speak. "You couldn't have –"

He shrugged, a little boy caught out in an offense others deemed more serious than he did, confused by their anger. "I'm – I'm sorry. I think it was when we kissed the first time. I must have sensed or felt something unconsciously, because I had this dream afterwards where you were – well, you were…melting on one side." She was melting all over. Her mouth was open. "And it started me thinking and well, you're a cop, you know how easy it is to hack into someone's medical files…" He trailed off.

"Were you going to at least – _tell_ me you knew?" She hated the shrill note in her voice, hated standing there still hugging herself. "Or were you going to let me go on, like this –"

He nodded, acknowledging the latter. "I thought I'd act a little surprised." Some timbre had left his voice, the sarcasm that always permeated every word leaching away, she realized, leaving only him. "Look, I never dreamed you had this kind of problem with it. Not you. You're so – tough." The word came out like a caress. He might have said _beautiful_, or _caring_. "It just wasn't my major concern for the evening." And before either of them could draw breath he was close again, clutching her face in his hands – "Look, we're starting over -", kissing her hair – "I get to do this –", drawing her bra off her shoulders and hunting the clasp in back – "and you let me." He laid the bra with its pocketed prosthesis away on a chair and ran one finger over her breast on the left and on the right her scar. The space she occupied had emptied, leaving only the shame _yes I have a problem with it_ the moment that hung over every sexual encounter she had had since the cancer had torn through her life and left her shredded. Always needing to explain her body before she could satisfy it. Always afraid. Her empty skin throbbed beneath his fingers. "Did you really think –" he seemed lost in touching her– "that I wouldn't want to do it because of this?"

She made herself look at him. "Some men don't."

"You've been going out with castrati or what?"

And with a rush the moment was gone. Shriveled up and vanished, inside his voice and his joking and his eyes soft with sincerity. _Please hold me_. He held her close, his cock hard, and her hands were suddenly moving at his belt, loosening. "If," he whispered in her ear, "you hadn't already seen _me_ in all my glory when you made me strip, we'd be on equal footing now. So to speak." He waited for her smile. "Time to jump."

In the milky light that bathed the bed she forgot who they were, forgot that there was such a thing as bodies. There was skin on skin, full, a moving wave of desire; his hands, on and then in her, were her hands, autoeroticism of the truest sort; his cock was a part of herself she had only now discovered, the heft of it reassuring, her mouth on it eliciting a moan of such pleasure it shook her because it was her own moan, wordless words _we're together in this_. When he turned her it was a force of nature, wind or gravity. They knelt together on the bed, her back pressed to him, and he loosened her braid, with fingers that trembled and here and there with his lips, eating at her hair, lingering. The mirror above his dresser reflected the curve of their bodies. There was a woman in the glass who wasn't her, with a scar. "I can't do it that way," she told him, "with that mirror." She spoke simply, without the worry about what it revealed of her she might have felt with another man, and just as unhesitatingly he slipped from the bed and threw a shirt over the mirror, then returned to thrust into her, their cries bursting from them together.

****

"My tough lady."

They lay nestled, her skin still glinting from the moisture of his lips, small cooling patches in the heat they had generated. The lines had deserted his face, a change so abrupt he loomed almost as a stranger beside her, young, without a care.

"I'm not tough," she told him. She lay her head on his chest and felt the pulsing there. "If I were, things wouldn't affect me the way they do. The things I see, or – the things that happen to me."

She had told him the story of her body once they lay still together – the cancer itself, a subject he knew almost more about than she did, having bled her file of every medical detail, and she had moved on to the details no file contained, the emotional support her ex-husband couldn't give her, not the way she had imagined, and which had made her realize she couldn't be with him, the unexpected surgery phobia that kept her from going in for reconstruction. Five years told in half a minute. She told him about the men, while his lips pursed in disbelief, about the twenty-something stockbroker who, after watching her undress and the initial surprise, had sat on the bed with her patting her hand and talking about it because that was what sensitive men did and never got around to sleeping with her; the commercial pilot who kept his eyes on her face while he screwed her, as though to look down would mean death.

"It's as if that one place on me…expands, just swallows up the rest of me when they're looking at me. As if that's all I am." The stunned shadows in his eyes said he knew what she meant. She couldn't tell him how he had broken the spell, the expanding vulnerable moment she stood naked in front of him collapsing back in on itself at his matter-of-factness, the scar just a scar. "If I were tough, everything would just …run off my back, wouldn't it?" She ran her hand across his abdomen. "But it doesn't."

"If you weren't feeling things at all, you'd be dead. It's easy to be tough when you're dead."

"I've felt for the longest time like I'm barely holding it together." She spoke to the ghost of herself, lost in her thoughts. "Everything crumbling around me. When I had to arrest you…" His hand in her hair brought her back. "You don't know how hard it was to sit in that interrogation room with you. I thought I'd fall to pieces. I didn't want to be –"

"Sshh." His finger was on her lips. "I don't want to hear it. No apologies, remember?"

"You're tough," she told him.

"I'm the epitome of tough. Batting away every care with my cane. It's why four days without a certain bottle of pills had no effect on me at all."

"You didn't break and confess."

A strange look shot across his face. "Because there was nothing to confess."

"I'm pulling your chain, Greg."

"Don't pull that particular chain anymore."

She lay against him, weak. Exploring him, the new world of them, had taken all her strength. They had been in space and were returning; earth's gravity pulling at her hurt her throat. "I need to go," she whispered.

"Sleep here tonight."

"I – I don't want anyone to know about this…yet." Muscles in his chest stiffened.

"I'll set the alarm for four," he told her. He had turned away to the clock. "No one will be up then. You can make your getaway without being seen." The _getaway_ held bitterness, but when he turned back there was nothing of it in his face. He touched her lips as they settled to sleep. "Here tonight, gone tomorrow." It was a question. She was already shaking her head. "Tell me you're not going to play that whack-a-mole game with me anymore. Please. Ailyn."

"I won't. I couldn't." Sliding toward sleep. _Not anymore_.

**

He woke to a sound. Ailyn's body lay warm against him. Fragments of dreams coursed through him, limbs intertwined in moist sex, but the part of his mind that never stopped working knew the sound had been external. It came from the living room. The luminous clock dial said three. He extricated himself from her to half-sit, ignoring the pain stirring in his leg, and it woke her.

"Wha-"

"I think someone's in the apartment."

She was moving before he knew it. One hand pressed him back onto the bed, brushed his mouth to signal his silence, while she slid over him and wafted to the bedroom door. She moved like oil. _No, mercury_. A compact drop of quicksilver. Her purse stood on the table in the hall and she paused to lift something from it, her gun, and stopped at the corner to the living room, the barrel pointed down, with the ammo clip held in her other hand near the grip, not inserting it yet to avoid the noise, he realized. It was the classic pose from a thousand cop shows, cliche to the point of absurd, and yet in the way she stood naked, knees bent, on muscular legs, thighs gleaming white in the moonlight up to the curve of tensed buttocks, it became something ancient and tribal. He found he had stood to follow her. She spun around the corner, raising her arms, out of sight. Seconds had passed since they woke.

Then there were only the sounds of her, a door shoved, a mutter.

He had made it halfway down the hall when she returned. "What are you doing?" She looked pointedly at the cane he gripped in both hands.

"If you'd missed your shot, I was going to beat the intruder to a pulp with my cane."

"PETA might have come down on you. It was a cat on your balcony." She ejected the clip she had shunted into the gun at some point after all and stored it all casually back in her purse. "Knocked over a deck chair."

"Not what it sounded like."

She shrugged and slid past him to sit on the bed, legs sprawled, almost gangly, a child on a playground resting after a game of tag, breathing heavily, coming down. The shock of her reaction still roiled through him. "You seem...to expect me to be in danger," he murmured.

"Why would you think that?"

"You just went from woman to robocop in 2.3 seconds."

"It was a perfectly normal reaction."

"No it wasn't."

She looked away, chastened. He sat on the bed, angled to her, and watched her until the moment became uncomfortable. With her legs unselfconsciously open he could see the shadow of her hair there, more burnished red-gold than blond. The memory of their sex, only hours old, still pounded in him in spite of the sleep. He forced his thoughts from it and turned on a lamp. She still didn't look at him.

"No one," he began, "could come out of what I assume were deep and pleasant dreams of me and go into hunt mode that fast unless a fear of being followed occupied their every waking moment." She looked at him. Anger clenched his throat. "I'm still a suspect, aren't I?" _Motionless as a statue_. "Scared to be with me because it might put a dent in your precious career if they're watching?" Her lips opened, but nothing came out. He felt dizzy with anger. Grief at the loss of what had barely begun. _You've been a fool_. "Or did they tell you to get close to me? Is that it, Detective?"

She looked as though he had slapped her. "You think I slept with you to get information out of you?"

" I assume you were just following orders -"

"_Shut up_." With a shock he saw her eyes had gone red with tears. "How could you _think_ that?" He let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. "Believe me, I was strongly warned against getting too close to you. No, Greg, this is real." A sob lay buried beneath the words. "This is me."

"Prove it."

"Prove something to me first! Trust _me_ first with a little honesty."

It was time. He bent and swept his cane from the floor so swiftly she stiffened, then he unscrewed the two halves at their hidden point and showed her the hollow space inside. "Voila, message carrier." She had gone very quiet, staring. "Perfect for a rolled-up piece of paper. They x-ray everything going in at the prison but nothing coming out. And yes, I passed the message on to Cameron, and no, I don't know what it said because it was in code."

The admission had gentled her face. When she looked at him there was a different light in her eyes. She took the cane from him and studied it.

"You guys have no imagination at all," he added.

"The parking lot." He frowned and she gazed up, a laugh like a little _ahh_ escaping from her. "When I talked to you in the parking lot, right after you'd seen Nealy. You kept twirling this, playing with it. It was right under my nose then." They were both on the verge of laughter. "It must have been fun for you."

"I was scared to death." He lifted his wrists in a handcuff-awaiting pose. "So now that I've confessed, Detective, you can arrest me."

She scowled and batted his hands away. "Stop that." Like a sleepy cat she curled onto the bed beside him, her head near his thigh. It felt comfortable. "There were two messages."

"The second one wasn't on paper. Nealy told me about…a theory he had. He wanted me to research it." She waited.

In short concise sentences, aware of the exhaustion creeping up on him, he told her about the Norxylam. "Clozapine's for schizophrenia. And it's dangerous. It's why I'm terrified of the thought I could be forced by law to take it. My brain's important to me. Hell, my life's important to me." She had listened intently, apparently unperturbed that the knowledge might redefine her job as she saw it, that it meant she had condemned innumerous people to a treatment they didn't need and which could kill them. "I've come to the conclusion that the theist anomaly doesn't exist at all. Another prosecutable admission for you. Your turn now." He stretched out to lie beside her. "That act with the gun a minute ago?"

She stroked his hip. "All your fault. I've been acting so punch-drunk since I took your case my boss has started to think I may not be as loyal to CA as I should be. They could be watching me. It's made me a little nervous, that's all."

It would have to do. His cane lay wedged between them and she lifted it. "Put your rod away," she murmured. "Time to sleep."

"Yes, ma'am. Just tell me where to put it." He kissed the smile it aroused and switched off the lamp. Absurd to sleep. The alarm would go off in half an hour. In the dark her body was reduced to warmth and a velvet sheen against him. "Ailyn," he whispered, not knowing if she slept. "I need your honesty."

A hand rose to touch his cheek. "You have it."

****

_"I'm glad you told me, Ailyn, but I already guessed. I'm - good at sensing things like that."_

_"He's good at sensing things too, you know. You'd expect him to start figuring this out."_

_"It's all too – unimaginable for him, I suppose. Hey – _hey_."_

_"I'm sorry. I'm not usually a crier. You know that. I just – I don't know what to do. He will find out some day and I'm afraid he'll feel so betrayed that it will just…kill what he feels for me. That I won't be able to make him understand why I had to lie. How things can start out one way and then change." Pause. "You know that my loyalty is with him now, don't you? Entirely with him and nothing else. You're the only one I can tell that to. You understand it, don't you?"_

****

End of Chapter 10

A/N: I'm sorry this took so long. I had to do some time in RL, as punishment for havig ignored it for so long. I'm hoping it will pick up now. (Actually I've decided the only way these writers like King or Koontz can be so prolific is that they pay someone to live their life for them while they get on with the writing - Sigh..)


	11. Sunny Days I Thought Would Never End

Aberrant

11. Sunny Days That I Thought Would Never End

"No, pert is not the word, apart from being cliche. And pendulous is way off. Springy – I like springy."

He lay sprawled on the picnic table, wielding his cane like a shotgun to pick off birds far up in the sky that blithely ignored being shot and winged away across the park. Wilson sat on the bench with his back to him, flung open to the feeble sun. It was March; winter was decomposing into a memory.

"I think you should bring her to lunch in the cafeteria some day."

"It would scare everyone into staying off my case for a while, wouldn't it? They'd probably think she'd turned me and I was working for CA now. However -" He gave up on the birds, flipped lazily onto his side and targeted the back of Wilson's head. "No one _brings_ a woman like Ailyn McCullough anywhere. She goes where she wants."

"Still popping in and out of your life?" Wilson, as usual and without rancor, had stuck his finger in the sore place.

"It's not like that." He shrugged, a ludicrous gesture with one shoulder flattened against the table, useless because Wilson couldn't see it. _Right, try to shrug it off_. "She just…still wants to keep it secret."

He had told Wilson everything, soon – very soon – after that first night, needing to get it out, his only friend as always the perfect repository for all the things he could say nowhere else, just stuffing it in there, while the good doctor's eyebrows rose to make room for it all behind the not-so-surprised eyes. It was no betrayal of Ailyn's need for secrecy; Wilson was the soul of discretion whenever he knew the matter was serious. What he couldn't convey to him was how insane it had become, the sex all-encompassing, crazy-making, still snatched furtively – or so it seemed, though it could devolve into hours – once or twice a week, his place or hers (her apartment always making her more nervous, convincing him it was not him she felt was being watched but rather herself), going at it sometimes almost as soon as the door closed behind them, as vigorous as the proverbial minks, every metaphor apt right down to the one about coming up for air. He felt like he was sex-walking through the rest of his life, hair mussed, clothes probably buttoned wrong, a person constantly caught or almost caught in the act, fairly daring anyone to notice the difference in him, the fact that they didn't perturbing him only to the extent that it showed how pathetic he had been before for other reasons. And yet it wasn't all about the sex, this muddle-mindedness he found himself in. The sex in his life had always been a pleasure and an essential, fun and a release, in that order, but now some barrier was breaking down between it and the rest of him; the secluded hours with Ailyn were no longer a separate place where his body took what it needed and then came back to the world - the sex was a part of what he felt for her, entwining them, making something new. Bodies not going off to be separate again once they were finished with each other, but rather melded, all of her still there and a part of him afterwards in her smile against the pillow or the shape of her fingers around a coffee mug in the morning. He hadn't known that was possible.

With a _hmppf_ Wilson turned, found the cane pointed at his face and tipped it away with one finger.

"So is it lust or is it love, House?

"I hate multiple-choice. Can I write you an essay?"

Was it lust? Certainly. Was it love? He had believed life no longer held that experience in waiting for him, not after Stacy. His after-Stacy era had been a long slide toward a future he assumed would be more of the same, pain and the torment of his memories; that old adage, by someone famous and dead, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, he had come to think was the other way around for him – those, like him, who could not repeat the past were condemned to remember it. Ailyn had changed that. Was it love? They never said the word. Seldom talked about themselves as a couple at all unless it involved their little non-disclosure agreement. They laughed and talked about seemingly everything but when he analyzed it later it was more like nothing. Getting-to-know-you, yes, getting-to-know-all-about-you, no. Her childhood came up glaringly short, the parents appearing only as background extras in the occasional anecdote, but then he wasn't big on the subject himself; if there had been abuse or some other trauma he could let her stay silent on it. Was it love? The word frightened the hell out of him. It was an imposter anyway, slipping into the disguise of anything the love-doped speaker wanted it to be. He felt…happy. When the key he'd given her rattled in his door late at night, the sound like a warm shot of booze in his blood, and she slipped in, wanting him, pulling him to the couch or the floor or the piano bench while they stripped and laughed, when she ran her mouth up his chest and he felt the nipple of one erect breast trailing after and on the other side nothing, then he thought he would burst with happiness because it was _her_, her body, given over to him, its scar like a badge, a new kind of symmetry become more perfect to him in its familiarity than the conventional one. His asymmetrical lover. It was happiness so immanent he knew he could not dissect it for fear it would slip away. It was easier to explain to Wilson his fears.

"For a long time," he began slowly (the oncologist had turned away, sensing his reluctance, giving him space), "the future was this long path leading nowhere. It was my future and there was no way to get off. I was headed toward…" He couldn't say what he had been headed toward. It was too terrible, and Wilson knew it anyway. "Now I've found a way off. I've gone off on a tangent."

"You needed to get off that path."

"That's why I'm staying on this tangent as long as I can." _Maybe it leads out of the woods_.

Down by the lake joggers rushed past on the way to their own futures. Wilson shook off the pensive moment first. "So –" He turned and slapped the table. "When do I get formally introduced? I'm thinking dinner, somewhere expensive, since you'll be forced to pay for once if you want to maintain that real-man image in front of her."

"We'll do it. Give me time. I'm not even seeing her today. She's up in New York, she needed a new prosthesis. The old one broke."

He had told Wilson Ailyn's medical history. The oncologist frowned. "That's rare. Those things are made to last. How –"

"We were playing catch with it." The memory made him grin.

For a quiet moment Wilson said nothing. "I'm so glad you're having fun, House." He snorted. "No, really. No sarcasm there." When he glanced up there was a new light in his friend's eyes. They both grinned, conspirators in his happiness. He turned onto his back and shot another bird with his cane, sound included _kerboom_, and then they were laughing.

****

Her heart wasn't in it.

She looked down at the desk strewn with notes that were supposed to be leads to the underground and John Galt and realized she had just written _Darren Blackwell_ on the blotter and drawn angry-terrorist eyebrows over both _a_'s. She didn't even remember doing it. Cops passed behind her, a stream of activity in the detail room, any one of them could have seen it, and she casually tore off the corner and wadded it to a hard bead before round-filing it. She was going a little crazy. Mistakes like that couldn't be allowed. She could pretend to work, passing on tidbits to the far-flung paper-trail team she'd been assigned to after Chase quit – no new partner to look over her shoulder made it easier - and she could even ignore her own pet project for a while, though the names on her secret list were apparently ready to pop out of her subconscious at any moment, but she couldn't pretend her heart was in any of it, when it knew the only case she cared about getting on top of would be waiting for her at his apartment that evening.

She felt her stupid-smile coming on again, the one that had been directing itself for weeks at blank walls and elevator doors that opened suddenly, and she buried her face in her notes as Charlie Dalton slumped into the chair across from her. "Guys at Tally's tonight," he proclaimed. He had made the same abbreviated proposal three Fridays running.

Useless to try and work. "Look, I've – got an appointment." She shoved the notes aside and found her jacket.

He was staring. "It's 4:30."

"So I'm taking off early. Cover for me, wouldya?" His gaze held hers for a moment too long, saying nothing.

And then she was hurrying up the steps of the brownstone, scanning the streets automatically for occupied cars, though her heart wasn't in that either, and he was opening the door, shirtless because he had been catching the dying rays filtered into the kitchen from his western-facing balcony while he cooked dinner, a rolled polpettone this time. She suspected he had never cooked in his life before he met her, his attempts so far all memorably unmemorable. The meatroll he was shoving into the oven looked like a leftover from one of his autopsies.

"Those delicate doctor's hands rolled that?" she chided.

He grinned without looking up. "I'll show you delicate after we've eaten."

"Oh why wait?"

She was always breathless. This moment, of touching him again, fingers smoothing the hairs on his chest while he pretended diffidence that lasted for maybe one second – it always felt like the first time. They were always coming at each other from the place they had started, from opposite corners in their boxer ring, moving at top speed and happily colliding.

"This meal won't take that long."

"Let it burn."

Then they were stripping each other, mouths and hands everywhere (always more hands than seemed possible, she would stop them some day and count but not now) and they ended up on the pile of their clothes on the floor. It frightened her how ready she always was for him. As though an earthquake shook her open, the cleft in her peeling back before he could even enter her, the rest of her reduced to rubble and smoke. A roar in her ears that was her own loud cry.

"What's that smell?"

"Blackened meatloaf. We've been down here forty minutes."

"No we haven't."

They were comfortable naked. Clothes were someone's bad invention. They ate naked and laughed at his stories from the hospital. She stood at the balcony door and said, "I'm going out there someday." They were so often a nudist colony of two that she had never even been out to admire his view.

"Not like that you're not. There's a dress code. As in, you have to be dressed."

She opened the door and stepped out.

"You don't know my neighbor," he murmured behind her, grinning. Only a flimsy partition separated his balcony from the next.

"The fifty-something starer with the Brylcreem abuse problem?"

"Not above spying through the chinks." He stepped out with her and they leaned to watch the quiet street below, leached of color by the dusk. "Is this you not being afraid of being watched?" he finally asked. She didn't know what to say. _It's me being so happy I don't care_. Or it was just inexcusable carelessness. He nudged her hip with his. "Ready for some new licks?"

He was teaching her to play the guitar. The wood against her bare stomach was as sensuous as his skin. She was hopeless at it, the kind of hopeless that as usual had them laughing so hard they couldn't go on, and as usual he left her stretched out on the sofa and slotted in some music that was going to show her what her ultimate learning goal was, Steve Cropper or Brian May. "Makes me wanna dance." She had closed her eyes. When she opened them he was gazing down at her.

"Can't see you as the dancing type, Greg." Queen coiled around them. She felt drunk and couldn't remember if they had drunk anything.

"I killed. I was the king."

Then she was up and they danced, rocker-wild, laughing, while he pumped the music louder with the remote. The contortions his leg necessitated gave a mondo cool to his thrashing movements and she dissolved into it, into him, she wasn't drunk she was tripping he had injected her with something _of course he did _she was eighteen again and the world was all right, it would go on forever head-banging against this wall of sound while they held each other up, laughing too hard to stand, and he called out incomprehensible commands like "Listen to that bent string!" The music was just music to her, buzzing now with an out-of-rhythm chord he hadn't taught her –

He cut the music. It was the doorbell.

"My neighbor!" he announced gleefully into the silence. "Come to complain about the noise." He stalked naked to the door and threw it open. "Mr. Sneider - here for a threesome?"

A glimpse of Brylcreemed hair and popping eyes too busy moving up and down Greg to pick her out in the background, before she dived for the couch face-down, stifling screams of laughter that missed Mr. Brylcreem's sputtered reply, only grasping Greg's "Can't a guy have some fun every five years or so?" and a slammed door.

She turned on her back and he straddled her, held her down. Her laughter reignited his, their gigglefests always threatening to never end.

"It could have been anyone, Greg" she finally gasped. "Someone from your work –"

" – someone from _your_ work –"

" – or a carpet salesman. The guy's spooky."

"He's a hero. Saving the petrolatum industry single-handedly. Unless he smoothes it on with both hands."

"He tried to chat me up on the stairs last week. Think I should tell him I'm coming here to screw you?"

"Tell him you come here to be with me."

Relaxed, she didn't catch the earnest note in his voice. "I'm sorry, Mr. Sneider, I come here to screw Dr. House, not you," she incanted dreamily.

"You come here to be with me." His hands on her wrists beside her head had tightened, his face intent as though waiting to draw his next breath from her. "Say it."

She couldn't look away from him. So much in the little difference. It was simple. Like falling off a cliff. "I come here to be with you," she told him.

If you could fall upward then she fell off her cliff into him, his body meeting hers halfway, his cock engorged as though some dam had broken inside at her words, hard instantly, plunging into her. Such joy in his face. The pounding in her was a rock beat, but he had turned the music off, it was only her, the deeper person inside her thrumming to get out, threatening to explode. He was clumsy from his leg on the narrow sofa and she ended on top of him, both of them urgent as children, begging it out of each other until they collapsed. She lay with her head on his chest and listened to his heart, fast and wild as a gong reverberating, shaking everything, the heart of a world.

They lay for eternity without speaking, until the pulse beneath her ear settled, his chest a steady ocean swell, and she knew he was asleep.

Gently so as not to wake him she rose on one elbow. She liked to watch him sleep. His face had a peaceful aspect it almost never had when he was awake, all worry erased. _Do I look like that when I'm asleep?_ She couldn't imagine it. Even when every other thought fell away, even in moments like this (when that happier person in her almost made it out through the chinks), she could reach up to her face and feel the pinched look she knew others spoke of as hard. No, there was a muscle she never unclenched entirely, no matter how relaxed she was, and it was seizing up even now. Remembering how she'd stepped out on his balcony. Remembering the odd looks when she left work early for the hundredth time. One more glance at his peace. She hated to ruin it.

She stirred enough to wake him. "Greg?"

"Hmmh?"

"Do you know how to shoot a gun?"

He came fully awake. She watched the creases return around his eyes. "My dad was Marine Corps." Yawn. "You can bet he made me learn."

"But you haven't in years, right?"

"Why?"

"I want to get you a handgun you can keep here. I'll take you to a shooting range so you can get some practice."

It was gravity pulling the lines of his face down. The look in his eyes was trust. "All right."

The dark was all there. They lay in the wash of car lights from the street below for a long time before she rose to get dressed.

****

_How old are you?_

Young, very young. It was as though being in love had reversed the process of aging within him. He felt energetic, a kid going through it for the first time. She took him to the shooting range (where he availed himself well, he thought, the admiration in her gaze like a caress) and it was fun, a word he had to roll around in his head for a while before recalling the meaning of. They fled for a three-day weekend to Atlantic City, screwing in the hotel room for hours and venturing out in the evening as a real couple among real people (_they all think we're married_, he had murmured to her across a fancy table the first night and she had looked back, calm and smiling, and said _I know_.) Every day with her made him younger. Time running backwards. By the time she assented to a dinner with Wilson, he figured he had regressed to the naive phase, all jumpy as a teenager inside preparing for the evening. It had to show in his face.

He half-expected the restaurant to card him.

Some change had come over her in the weeks as well. It might have been (he hoped) that she had seen what her secrecy was doing to him. And to them. Having her there one moment or weekend and always gone the next had jigsawed his life into a puzzle which – as stimulating as it was - he could no longer make sense of. It was a relationship seen by strobe, chopped up into brilliant bits and pieces of what it could be. It had made him fall into rhythms that sapped that energy he gained from being with her. During their Atlantic City weekend she mentioned how few Vicodin he seemed to take. _Oh I make up for it in droves when you're not around, _he had told her in all honesty, refraining from explaining how much more dangerous to the body that kind of on-off rhythm was than the regular overuse he had previously indulged in. Her long look had told him she already knew. And at some point afterward, without knowing exactly when, he realized she had stopped looking over her shoulder. Started coming around more often. Loosening up on her secrecy, not as though she had come to believe it wasn't a problem – more like she was resigned to fate.

A hand was flapping in front of his face. Wilson's. He scowled it down. Wilson and Ailyn were both grinning at him.

"The idea," Ailyn told him, "was that you would be here with us during the meal, Greg. Where did you just go?"

"My multitasking brain was curing cancer and finding a solution to world peace while you two – did your thing."

Far from the stilted, forks-clattered-in-embarrassed-silence affair he had imagined, the dinner was turning out amusing. Ailyn and Wilson had a lot in common, the lot being him, and they got along like opioids got along with his brain. They had paired off against him to mine it for all it was worth.

The first thing she had said to Wilson was, "I understand you guys are on your third marriage together," He had told her about their spats. The number seemed arbitrary. "We break up only to make up," was Wilson's reply.

"You can't cure cancer, House," the oncologist was saying now. "You'd put me out of a job." He winked at Ailyn. "This is that God complex of his, I suppose."

He was a little shocked. The wuss who had been too pussy-footed about CA to pick him up after his arrest seemed to have vanished. Or he had forgotten who he was joking with. But then Ailyn had forgotten who she was. He had never seen her face softer. Her job was a million miles away. She smiled at him, happy to be conspiring with Wilson to tease him. The two of them actually had their heads together, a let's-talk-about-him-as-if-he's-not-there pose. "It is a problem," she admitted. "Has he ever been to therapy?"

Wilson nodded and sighed. "Primal screaming hurt his throat, so he invented primal whining."

"I am _not_ paying for this dinner," he informed them, "just to sit here and have my id bagged on by the likes of you two." Which, he realized, proved the point.

She leaned across the table, one finger on one of his. The tea-light candles seemed to have fallen into her eyes. "It's okay, Greg." She was only half-joking. "You can be _my_ God anytime."

Once she had left to go to the ladies' room Wilson looked at him. "Didn't you once refer to her as Beauty or the Beast? Not much beast there."

"That was a long time ago." The early days in fact, when he had been trying to explain to Wilson how she seemed to switch back and forth between a come-hither sultry with him and her police mode. The thought seemed antiquated now.

Wilson had come down with a case of the stares. That x-ray vision again; he was being irradiated. "Do you ever wonder," Wilson's voice was milky, "if it's true what they say, that there's one person out there for everyone?" _Don't go there_. "Think she could be the one for you?"

Heat surged through him, the effect of gears grinding his mind to a halt before he could think it. He didn't want to think it. He shrugged instead. "This idea of there being one - and only one - person out there for you is a very egotistical concept. It presupposes that _your_ thoughts and feelings are unique – that not one out of the thousands of people you've met in your life has had the capacity – the depth – to see that very special you for what you are."

"I've seen you for what you are," Wilson snorted into his drink.

"It's just not the romantic concept everyone thinks it is, to say there's one soulmate out there who will truly understand 'me'." He made the quote marks with his fingers. "It's about as arrogant and self-centered as you can get." He fiddled with his collar. _Hot_. "So – no, I do not think like that." Wilson waited. "I think – two people happen to find each other and it happens to click." Two people whose souls happened to mesh in so many ways you could no longer pull them apart. "Fate optional."

"What's optional?" Ailyn had rejoined them.

"The presence of one James Wilson, MD at our table. I'm thinking a digestive stroll for you and me while he picks up the tab."

She wasn't paying attention. She stared across the room, the change in her face so alarming he felt his pulse ratchet up a notch. He believed he knew her every expression, they had become a part of his dreams, but fear was a new one. "What is it?" he murmured.

She came out of the trance with a "Nothing," and raised her drink high in front of her face. It was so obviously a shield that it made him turn and try to follow her line of sight. A man at a window table was just turning away, dark hair, his own age maybe, laughing and chatting to the woman at the table with him. Customers lined the bar. A waiter caught his eye, thinking he needed serving. Any one of them could have triggered her panic button.

"So someone you know is here," he muttered. Ailyn was posing for a mug shot now, head turned away from the opposite corner almost ninety degrees, as though the restrooms behind her were fascinating, and who said they weren't. _The next sound you hear is your evening flushing away_. "Someone from work?" He couldn't keep the anger down. "Oh no, what are we going to do? If they see you with me, you're fucked." Wilson had found a stain on the tablecloth and was studying it intently. "Your career down the drain – why, they'll even take away your toys." She was shaking her head. "You'll have to start a home catering service with Chase."

"Just maybe," she whispered, the words directed at the restrooms so that he had to lean to hear, "just maybe this is more about you than you already so selfishly assume. Maybe I don't want you involved in something that's not your fault, Greg." When she glanced at him he was stunned by a vague impression of tears, though her eyes were dry. The suffusion lay beneath her skin.

He looked across at Wilson, no support there, the tablecloth stain now apparently the subject of a vast grant-assisted research project, and he took his cane off the arm of his chair and pushed the button set in the top of the smooth wood. A pill dropped into his palm from the Pez-style dispenser he had had custom-installed in the tip. Ailyn's idea, a joke really after seeing his hollow cane, and one she hadn't expected him to follow up on, but it had been good as a conversation-stopper for the past month. No one said a word as he slipped the pill into his mouth.

"We've got to leave," she finally said.

"Go on," Wilson told them. "I'll pay."

As they headed for the door - his comment "You mean we're not sneaking out through the kitchen?" making her face go even harder - he glanced toward the corner. The dark-haired man wasn't looking at them.

At his apartment it was boxing night. She retreated into her corner, only to come out at the sound of the bell. He got in the first punch. "Okay, what's so _terrible_ about being seen with me, huh? Other than it makes you look short –"

"Greg –"

" – you should wear heels –"

"I ask you for this one thing, to accept that I need to keep it secret –"

"So take a paper bag next time and put it over my head!"

Round one which, he felt, went to him.

"It's not like that, Greg. And I haven't heard you inviting me up to the hospital."

"How about tomorrow? We'll do lunch." Well-blocked.

She stood, open. He could think of nothing else to throw at her. "I'm still a suspect," he surmised.

"Right. I'm just spying on you. Sure."

"It's possible."

She hadn't seen it coming. The sincerity in his voice was a right hook to the chin. "Do you – _can_ you - think I would do that?"

"Chase did."

"You can actually believe everything I've done with you was – _faked_?" She looked ready to cry. A technical knock-out. He thought the referee ought to call it off now. _No_, he would tell her, _I do not believe it_. If he had to think that none of it was real then the ground he stood on would fall away.

"Look, Greg –" She was fighting herself now. "I didn't intend to get involved with you. Not like this. No one told me to, no one wanted me to. This whole thing." Her voice chilled him. "This – us. It wasn't meant to happen. It was a mistake. It should have stopped before it even got started."

If he ever had a heart attack he would know what it felt like, the clenching in his throat, blood-flow cut. It was a blow to the chest. You only pointed out mistakes if you were planning to rectify them. It wasn't meant to happen. Fate optional. She would tear herself from him now, her words as matter-of-fact as the beeping back-up signal on a truck. _Getting out of here now, move out of my way_. He could already feel the blank space in his mind where her body had been, the weight of her strength that had propped him yanked away so fast he would stumble and fall. _Don't do this. Don't say you're leaving_.

"But it did start," she said quietly. "And there's no stopping it now."

In the silence his phone rang. He didn't move to answer it. They waited, head-locked in their gaze, while his taped voice clicked on - "After the beep you may leave a message, which I will neither listen to nor answer" - and Wilson asked if everything was all right, paused for far too long and after a Wilsonesque throat-clearing hung up.

"We have to work this out," she finally said.

"No, what we have to do is just drop it." He found his cane and dispensed himself a pill. "Default situation. You keep looking over your shoulder - that spasmodic torticollis ought to keep us safe – while, if you'll excuse me, I'll just get back to wasting away in Vicodinville." He made a circus of swallowing the pill and stomped into the kitchen.

"You can't live with the secrecy, Greg, and I need it –"

Dirty glass; might have held anything but now it would be brandy. He poured three fingers. She stood in the door. "We have to find some compromise. We are going to talk."

"I said we're dropping it."

"You never drop anything."

He held the glass at arm's length _didn't want it anyway_ and let it fall. It shattered gloriously. Her mouth fell open. Another trek back past her through the door. Childish always threw them, but the glee was fading fast. "Go home," he told her as he passed her. It was his last, thoroughly exhausted punch and he could barely raise his arm for it. "Go on home, Ailyn. They may be watching your place, noting when you get in." _Please stay here_. He stopped in the living room.

"I'm not spying on you."

"Oh, I know that. You're just keeping things from me. Even I know the difference."

"You're mad at me for being involved in things I can't tell you about, is that it?"

"I just thought we were going to tell each other everything." A mature request he felt he should get points for.

"I want to tell you everything, Greg. Even when I can't."

"Prove it." It seemed an echo. He was always needing proof, evidence, anything that might make sense of their crime scene.

"I love you."

_That would do it_. He felt abruptly heavy, leaning so hard on his cane there in the middle of the room that he thought it might break because he was huge now, filling up with some substance he couldn't name. As though he had never had mass before. Becoming real. There were tears in her eyes. He had hurt her with love. Made her weak, when he wanted to make her strong. The way she made him strong.

"I know you're not spying on me." _Time for honesty_. He spoke calmly. "I know all these secrets you keep are not about your job, Ailyn." _Plunge in_. "What I've figured for a while now is that you were turned, at some point, maybe by some Christian you were interrogating, or just by having to deal with it all the time, the ideas and practices. That at some point you decided they were right and that's when you became a Christian and started working as a double agent."

He watched her face turne to stone as he spoke, shock petrifying to numb fear as she leaned against the kitchen door for support. It told him he was right.

"It was little things at first that tipped me off," he went on. "The way you reacted, back last autumn, out in the parking lot at Kearney when I said you ought to visit Nealy and get to know him. You gave me this… scared look like maybe I'd hit on something I wasn't supposed to. Then when you were interrogating me you mentioned 'all the civil liberties _we've_ lost'. Not 'what _they've_ lost'. Only a sympathizer would word it like that." Her mouth was opening again, a mute cheer for his skills of observation. She hugged herself and a small sigh that might have been a sob came from her. "And then there was the black wig, behind all that distinctly unused ski equipment, in a box underneath old sweaters and a stack of newspapers at the very back of your closet."

"You went through my apartment." He had thought she couldn't speak.

"S.O.P." It seemed lame. "The point, Ailyn, is that it doesn't matter. What hurts is that you would think it would matter, that you couldn't trust me enough to tell me about it. Like you thought maybe I'd…report you, or hold you down with my cane and force Norxylam down your throat. You know I don't believe anymore that theism is an illness. You're free to believe whatever kooky life principle you want. And I could live with the secrecy, I would happily leave every restaurant in town with you if –" The honesty hurt his throat. "If you were in danger. I just need to know what it is I'm in. I need you to trust me enough to see that we're in it together. To let me in on it."

"The camps are divided." From her hollow voice he understood a metaphor, then realized she was stating a fact. "Men and women on opposite sides. If we were ever sent there, we wouldn't be together." A tear had trailed to her cheek and stopped. She held herself unnaturally still.

"Tell me how it started. It was Nealy, wasn't it? You interrogated him at some point, talked to him in prison." He seemed to remember Mike Nealy telling him he never had visitors. "He's a persuasive personality. Is that it, Ailyn? You met Nealy - somehow, somewhere - and he turned you?"

She hadn't moved. "He didn't need to." The stillness of the apartment swirled with her words. "He's my father."

****

End of Chapter 11


	12. The Questions Run So Deep

**12. The Questions Run So Deep**

"My name is Aimee Lynn Nealy," his lover told him and then she began to sob.

****

The little girl loved her daddy. He was big and laughy, with red hair she could muss when he lifted her into the air, and freckled skin. He smelled like the school she went to though he didn't work there, he worked at a big people's school, the house on weekends full of students arguing about things she couldn't understand, with an anger her freckled daddy seemed to absorb into himself and give back out as peace. She was ten before she understood that. This anger all directed at the government, or so she began to filter out from the conversations, which made no sense because her daddy said the government was what you wanted it to be, so how could you hate it. Then she was twelve and the faces coalesced into those who were welcome in the house and those who elicited daddy's own rage, an anger she knew herself only when she had done something very wrong, and so it made sense when those faces stopped coming back. Fifteen then, with a sharp, sad mind that knew they were living dangerously, that her house was not a place to bring friends from school, though she still did not grasp the extent of it, only that her father's views and writings made him hated, always on the verge of being fired from the college or arrested, until he sat her down and told her all of it. The underground, the organizing of propaganda, hidden in philosophy dissertations and indignant, likeable letters to editors, the effort to create a tipping point in public opinion, teachers as spies in schools, instilling in children a feel for something lost for five hundred years.

"I didn't take to it. Maybe he had waited too long. Too scared when I was younger that I might blurt something out. I was mad at him for having not trusted me till then. And for having put us in so much danger for so long. It seemed selfish of him – these ideas and goals of his being so much more important to him than us. As a kid you can't imagine an ideal being more important than yourself. We argued a lot after that. He was sad that I couldn't accept Christianity. Mom had, back when they'd first fallen in love and he had revealed it all to her, and so he couldn't understand why I didn't accept it. Close to the end of my senior year I had decided I would talk to him one more time about it after I graduated, a real sit-down talk, come to some kind of solution we could both live with the rest of our lives. That was in May of 1989."

The sobbing had subsided long ago. His own shock had drained him. He had muttered "No" over and over at first as she gasped out details, simple denial, the biker seeing the brick wall coming at him, until he thought of her eyes, the similarity he had been aware of only as a caged strength but that was there in the shape and color if he had only seen it. He held her, as they sat on the floor in the kitchen doorway and she pieced together for him the puzzle they were caught up in.

"It was horrible for us after the bombings. I know it was a living nightmare for millions of others, the ones poisoned, and the refugees all fleeing the cities. There wasn't a person in the country who didn't know someone killed or affected by it, or who just huddled together in front of their TVs at night and watched strangers dying in the makeshift hospitals, but for us – it was bad but there was the fear too. We knew it would come around to him. When the bombers made that call and claimed to be Christians, when it came out on the news, he cried and threw things - I'd never ever seen him like that, just torn to pieces. He was broken. And his writings and the things he'd said in his classes, he'd always stayed just on the legal side of obvious, to try and provoke a response from people about Christianity, but we knew it was just a matter of time before those investigating the bombings would call him some kind of ringleader. We sat at the kitchen table the second night, just me and Mom and him, and he told us to go to Montana, hide with Christian friends at a safe house there, but that he wouldn't be coming with us. Mom screamed at him." Ailyn's sob was a leftover and he pulled her close and stroked her hair. "He really thought he could prove something, get up in a courtroom and tell the world what Christianity was about and they would listen. Mom and I left that night. It was the next day that they came for him."

As she spoke, vague non-recollections came to him; Nealy's wife and daughter, a teenager, had been the subject of speculation. Never found. It had been assumed Christians spirited them away.

"So we lived at the safe house, became new people with a new name. The old couple who lived there were good to us. The Christian underground who went in and out thought we were a part of them, almost expected us to become leaders like Dad, I think. But Mom had only become a Christian for Dad's sake, when they met. It had never been real for her in the same way. She pretended to have the peace and acceptance about it all she was supposed to have as a Christian, but she got more and more depressed." A darkness he could imagine, rolling down upon them in the small Montana town. "It had been so terrible to watch the trial, to see Dad believing that they were going to listen to him, and to watch it all closing in on him. I remember how you could tell he knew it too, toward the end. He got so – small. And then the sentencing, so tense, we were all sure it would be the death penalty. Mom refused to watch, just sat up in her room with her hands folded. I think they sentenced him to life because they understood people would need someone to hate for a long time. He would be their living example. And maybe he would cough up information some day on all those hordes of wild-eyed Christian terrorists waiting to bomb another city."

He thought of the charcoal sketches lining Nealy's cell-room walls, the woman with the gentle sturdy face, drawn from memory.

"We lived there for seven years. I wanted a life - you know, I couldn't go out because our faces had been on the news, and Mom didn't even want to go out. After a few years of living like a ghost, I got the underground to pay for nose and chin surgery for me. I didn't know what to do with myself. Any kind of life seemed impossible. I got a job in the local supermarket. Had to listen to people talk about Michael Nealy, the mass murderer. And one day when I came home and Irene and George told me Mom wasn't answering from the locked bathroom, we broke in and –" Her gesture said despair, a grasp toward what was long gone. "She had slit her wrists in the tub." He tried to hold her tighter. "The day after the funeral I packed my things and went to apply for a job with Christian Affairs."

He looked for his voice; it was crushed inside him somewhere. "To find the real terrorists." He felt her small nod. "To prove your dad's innocence."

"It was going to be just that. But there had always been spies in CA, Christian double-agents, working from the inside to sabotage CA's efforts. I became a part of their network automatically. We help people escape. When someone calls to report their neighbor might be a Christian, we have ways to help the victims, call them on throw-away cell phones and warn them, or make sure we get there first and vanish them before the real unit arrives. They left me out of the loop on Cameron or I would have done that for her. And those who do get arrested we can get out sometimes - mess up their records, leave locked doors open." A smile almost touched her lips, memories of little victories. He remembered her telling him about spies during his interrogation. He had deemed it a ploy to get him on her side, but it had been true; she had been talking about herself. "And all the time there's the more subtle work – trying to keep CA on the track it was meant for, using our influence in any way we can without being too obvious, to remind them they're supposed to be catching the real terrorists."

"Conspiracy Theory 101."

He had said it without thinking, but she drew back with a withering look that shamed him. "They're out there, Greg." Her belief, perhaps the only one she had to live for. She had said it from the beginning, since the Korean restaurant and many times since, the only true justification for her job, and he hadn't listened.

"I'm sorry," he admitted, without sarcasm. "If you say it, it's true."

"I have a list." Fervent now, clasping the lapel of his coat (he realized he still had it on, the retreat from the restaurant a dim memory) as though to buttonhole him into listening, she told him the theories she had, a list of names, the extraction of which had apparently not been routine surgery and which would prove who the real Dirty May bombers had been. The need to find them in case they were planning something new. He felt her strength as she spoke, caught up in the details that had obsessed her for so long and that she had had to keep to herself, laying his hand over hers on his coat to calm her, her determined face so close their breath entwined, and he wondered why the notion of a goddess had not survived into modern times along with that of a god.

_Leave out half of humanity, the feeling half, and you have nothing_.

"It's the only work that matters," she was saying, "and they ignore it. I've been using CA resources to pursue the task they've basically given up on. Dirty May's not even mentioned anymore."

A memory tickled him. "Didn't you say your boss was all hot for getting your father to confess to Dirty May? It must matter to him."

"Blenheim? Orders from above, I suppose." She pulled back again. "The point is, they don't really care. Seventeen years, and it's the Christian underground that's found out more about the bombers than they have. CA goes for the obvious targets, it makes better press. The housewife who picked up a Bible on the black market and has started reading it at home." He wiped at her eyes, gently, with the back of a finger and she let him, closing her eyelids to accept it. "You know how hard it was just to get that list? They wanted it suppressed. Dad could have told me the names, they were people who had tried to join him back then." Her eyes flew open. "But I can't visit him. There would be no reason for an underling like me to go into Kearney. It would draw attention to me. When you – on the parking lot, when you asked if I knew him, the reason I looked funny was because I was so nervous being that near, it was like his presence had come back out with you. As close as I could ever get to him again in this life. And the second time, in the guard room, was even closer. I was so scared you would say something about his health because you'd just come from seeing him in the infirmary, maybe say he was dying or something, and then I would have just broken down in front of you." _He's dying_. He wouldn't say it. The ashen face beneath the oxygen mask, blue lips telling him what strength was about. The Kearny doctor had called a week later to tell him Nealy was out of A-fib and he had shut away any further concern for the man, his own worries more pressing, trifling things like arrest and detox, but that staccato rhythm he had heard through his stethoscope never left him; it was pounding on him and Ailyn now, their hearts close, pulses unmatched. He sensed his was faster. One day it would be on the news that Michael Nealy had died.

"Actually," Ailyn was looking away from him, "I think if I ever saw him again, I would scream at him. Like Mom did that last time, because of what he put himself and us through. All for something I – personally can't believe in." _You would be angry at him for being so strong_. He recalled the rage Nealy had provoked in him by merely pointing out the truth about him. By being accepting of fate, in contrast to his own silent drawn-out scream of _No!_ that played out as addiction and misanthropy.

"You're a triple agent," he told her. She started to protest, then saw what he meant. "Pretending to be a Christian to work with Christians who pretend not to be Christians in CA. The aberration inside the aberration. I suppose the other spies think you're doing it out of the same conviction they are."

"In a way I am. I mean, they have their precepts and rules and because I don't live by them the other Christians assume it's to blend in at CA better. Daddy wanted to teach me what it meant, those last few years, and I never listened. I'm more my mother, with the skepticism. But sometimes when I confront an arrested Christian and I see the conviction there, how they draw strength from it…. There's something real there." She glanced at him. "So you see now why I'm always looking over my shoulder. Not only could I be discovered because of the things I do as a spy sabotaging CA – someone could find out I'm Mike Nealy's daughter and get at me that way. I'm exposed on two sides. And some scary things have happened lately." She told him a convoluted story he tried hard to follow, a contact named Rick whom she thought worked in the government and who had stopped showing up for their rendezvous.

"Rick's replacement knew to look for the black wig and he knew to call me Aimee, but something about him didn't click."

He sensed more. "And?"

"That man was in the restaurant this evening."

They were quiet for a moment. His mind ached; it had been stretched like a rubber-band and shot off into terra incognita. _Poinng_. "I don't even know whether to call you Aimee," he noted.

She shook her head against his chest. "I've been Ailyn for too long, Greg. That's who I am. I had a husband call me Ailyn for three years, you know. He had no idea of my history, and it took me that long to confess it to him, at which point he promptly left because he couldn't handle it." _Couldn't handle her work_, she had once said. Which was true. "With you it's only taken two months."

"I'm flattered."

Outside the balcony gray light splintered into dawn, or maybe it was a car passing. It seemed as though years had gone by since they had slid to the floor. He felt warm and safe in his coat, with her body weary against his chest. Cocooned there together, the two of them, against the rest of the world. An idea nagged at him.

"Ailyn, I think I know a way you could visit your father."

He outlined it while she stared. It was simple, calling for just enough manipulative lying to keep it interesting. He watched her face, frightened at first and then yielding, loving him, and he waited for her answer.

****

They were taking the slow route, through Jersey towns amber-trapped in suburbia, ugly and pretty in turns. It had been Ailyn's choice, instead of the highway to Kearney, and he understood that she needed that slow approach to prepare herself for her father. He looked across at her as he drove. She sat straight-backed, but he could see the girl now, behind the exoskeleton she had erected around herself to get through life, soft in the way she reached out a hand to change the radio station because she needed the distraction. She had told him – vividly - about her meeting with Blenheim. "I'll be House's assistant," she had proposed to her boss after asking for a special conference with him. "Dr. House contacted me recently. His views have changed. He wants to help us. He believes Nealy was on the verge of talking about his past when he examined him last fall and that if he goes to see him again he may reveal something. Nealy doesn't know me. I'll be Dr. House's medical assistant. It's the last chance to get that confession you want, and I'll be there to make sure it's not some message-passing session, since I know you're not going to trust House just because I say so." The look Blenheim had given her, she told him, had chilled her to the bone, but he had consented.

So they were expected at the prison. They sat in the parking lot, while she breathed in and out several times before opening the door.

The doctor in the infirmary– Davies, he recalled – looked even more war-weary than he remembered. She told them Mike Nealy had been in and out of A-fib throughout the winter and that he had eventually been parked in the infirmary for the duration. "They're off his case, if you know what I mean." He supposed she meant there would be no new burn marks on his chest. "I think they're just hoping now for a deathbed confession." He felt Ailyn stiffen beside him and he couldn't look at her. Davies led them through sickrooms to a small courtyard in back. A fat guard half-dozed in a fold-out chair by the door. "We let him get out as often as we can. I mean, he's not going anywhere." On the other side of the yard, Nealy sat in a wheelchair, in the last rays from the sun about to dip below the high walls, a blanket over his legs, head lolled to one side. Asleep. Davies walked across with them and touched his shoulder, waking him. "Mike, you've got visitors." It was a scene from a rest-home, not a maximum-security prison. She left them alone.

Nealy came awake instantly, looked up with a grimace that might have been pain and then smiled. "Dr. House." A second, politer smile for the woman beside his visitor, that turned into a frown and then a clenched stare. They stood feet away from the wheelchair. He felt Ailyn move close to him, ostensibly to take the doctor's bag from her boss but more likely for the moral support of his body near hers, and he felt the back of her hand against his, shaking so hard it was almost slapping him. She crushed herself to him and the shaking, trapped between them, stilled. Toward her father she raised her other hand and drew a bent finger across her lips casually as though drying them, a signal that he shouldn't show he had recognized her.

Tears burst up into Nealy's eyes. He looked away, anywhere, only to come back to his daughter's face, joy so violent it fled from him in ragged breaths. It occurred to House that they had killed Mike Nealy by coming there, that his heart wouldn't survive the shock. He had never seen so much emotion in a face without the words to go with it. After a moment Nealy spoke.

"I know what you've been up to, Aimee." His voice had aged a thousand years since his greeting from moments before. "A prisoner brought in a few years ago knew about you and told me. Working from the inside. It's wonderful and I'm proud of you."

She had started to cry, huge silent tears, fumbling at the medical bag to hide it.

"You've changed your face," he went on, "but your eyes – they're the same."

With a horrified start House realized the guard had come up behind him and was poking the back of his knees with the folding chair. The guy held another for Ailyn. "Have a seat." He apparently hadn't heard Nealy's words. Ailyn kept her face turned away. The guard disappeared back into the infirmary. Left alone again, they sat in a tight huddle that blocked the view from the back door until the mute terror had drained from them.

Nealy was gentle; it was the only word that fit. He drew her life from her, in stops and starts, asking the questions that needed to be asked and listening all he could, while his daughter told him the ups and downs – small ups but tremendous downs – that her life had been since he had been imprisoned. She pretended to hand the great doctor the instruments he needed from his bag as she spoke, paying no attention to what she picked up, and he pretended to examine the prisoner with whatever ludicrous item she placed in his hand - atropine, a scalpel, a tongue depressor. She told her father about her breast cancer, how she had told the doctors she knew no family history because she was adopted (the lie-to-your-doctor syndrome he knew from the inside made him smile). How her husband leaving her had hurt. He felt he wasn't there, or shouldn't have been, listening to all these details she might have taken many more months to get around to with him, but there was no time for Ailyn and her father to pick and choose what they would tell each other just because he was there. They had seventeen years to catch up on. They were intent upon each other in a way he could never have imagined with his own father, wrapped up in one another's stories, heads bent close yet straight, he noted, not angled in any way that might signal emotion to anyone watching. He might have been another chair beside them, and that was all right.

Nealy opened his shirt to show her the burn scars, unselfconscious, and Ailyn's fingers on the stethoscope she was handing over tightened. The first appropriate item she had come up with from the bag, but she didn't let go even when he tugged at it, paralyzed at the sight of her father's chest. "We're going to get you out," she rasped.

"No you're not." Not a command. Nealy's voice was still gentle. It was a statement of fact. "I'm going to die in here, Aimee."

His matter-of-factness made her jerk upright, stubbornness reasserting itself. "I have a list," she announced. She was suddenly the cop again. The good cop. She told her father about the names and he nodded. "You wrote that letter to the authorities and they just ignored it, Dad. I'm going to find these men, if they're still alive, and prove they were the ones behind the bombings. That you threw them out because you wanted nothing to do with them."

"People will still believe I created them, that my writing instigated their actions. They won't let me go." They were both so stubborn. If there was a genetic component for bullheadedness, he supposed the Nealys had it. "You don't know these men are still active," Nealy added.

House leaned in. "What about John Galt? He could be one of these people, couldn't he?"

It was as if he'd brought up the subject of farts at a formal dinner party. They were silent, not looking at him. "John Galt is on our side," Nealy explained to him.

Switches in his mind flipped. It was like a game of Go, he realized. Just when he thought he was on top of it, the black and white changed places. Bad was good, and good was – viral, always altering its shape. Ailyn was looking at the ground, so she had known, and might have told him given time. Might have.

"He was a student of mine," Nealy was saying. "As opposed to violence as I was. We had talked about him taking over if anything happened to me." He remembered Nealy telling him about his handpicked followers. "All those reports making him out to be a terrorist gangleader are concocted by the government. They need an enemy. He –"

Ailyn cut in sharply. "These men, Dad." She shifted on her seat and he had the impression she had cut her father off deliberately. "I only have names, but you knew them. If you can remember details about them, describe to me what they looked like even, maybe it will help me find them."

The sun had fallen behind the wall, leaving them in shadow, and Nealy shivered.

"Ted Gaites was extremely troubled," he told her. "I got the impression - maybe from something he said – that he had been abused as a child. If any of the three blew themselves up in the bombings at all, then it was him. Kyle Henderson was the least fanatic. Never sure violence was the way to go. I might have changed him if he'd stayed around. Darren Blackwell –" Nealy bit his lip "-was a snake. There was something very, very wrong with his mind, but it wasn't noticeable until you'd talked to him a great deal. He thought he was a natural leader and kept trying to get others on his side, but he was terrible at it. He hated me for kicking him out, for asserting my leadership in the end. Some of the things he said to me before he left…. He scared me worse than the others." Ailyn waited. "What they looked like?" Nealy struggled for details. "Nothing that would stand out. Ted and Kyle were average everything – weight, height. Brown hair. Darren was different. Not a pretty face. He looked – squashed. A square-shaped head, big ears and lips. It made him look as if he was pouting all the time. I'm sorry, Aimee. I can't come up with more than that."

Through the arm pressed against his, House had felt her go rigid. The rhythm of her breath had changed. Her father leaned forward. "Is everything all right?"

"I'm fine." _Not fine_, he thought. Fine was when you sat back and smiled, maybe waving a hand to shoo off everyone's concern. It was not this sudden hunching forward, one hand over her mouth to keep herself from gasping. This was fear, terror because she had apparently recognized the description. And didn't want to alarm her father. He felt cold all the way through, capillaries curling in, turning his skin numb. _What kind of danger are you in, Ailyn?_

"I just don't want to leave you," she moaned to her father through her clenched hand. The fear sounded enough like despair that Nealy didn't question it. And it was true anyway. "It's just that I want more time with you. I don't want to go back out there." _Out there, where whoever the snake had molted into was waiting._

Her father seemed to accept it, and the next moment she was in control again, sitting back up and taking a deep breath, though the shadows in her eyes remained.

"We'll stay as long as you need," House told them. He picked up the stethoscope she had dropped. A breeze that tasted of evening had arisen, too cold for early June, lifting scraps of litter in the corners. "We're supposed to be examining the prisoner anyway, and incidentally getting a confession out of him. I suppose any confession will do. So, Mikey –" He turned to Nealy and crouched to listen to his heart. "Tell the nice doctor about those cigarettes you stole from your daddy's coat when you were ten."

****

_"I was so nervous about seeing Daddy, and then he looked so sick and – old. If Greg hadn't been there for the moral support I would have cried like a baby."_

_"Actually, Ailyn, I'm a lot more interested right now in what your dad told you. It's very scary and if it's true we need to get the information out to the others –"_

_"But that's it – I don't _know_ that Chuck Blenheim is Darren Blackwell. The description fit. I panicked for a moment, but I didn't say anything because I didn't want to scare Dad. Greg noticed. He made me tell him after we got back to his apartment. I was still shaking whenever I thought about it. He's never met Blenheim, so he thought the connection was a little out of left field, but then he saw how scared I was and…he held me. He said he would do anything to keep me safe, take orders from my underground group, if need be. 'The ones down in the caves,' is how he said it. He called them my Morlocks. I don't even know what that means."_

_- Sigh -_

_"Yes. That's the way it's going to be, you know. He won't help us out of some belief in Christianity. It was always a long shot anyway, this idea of yours back at the start that Greg House would be susceptible to Christianity, for who knows what reason –"_

_"His leg, I don't know. I just thought that if he had to confront it gradually, on his own terms–"_

_"-that he might accept it if he didn't know he was being manipulated into doing so. That's never going to happen. If he helps us, it's going to be for my sake, or because he thinks it's the right thing to do. Not because he accepts it for himself personally." Softer. "I'm still afraid of that, you know. What it's going to be like when he finds out it all started as a plan behind his back to manipulate him. That I was a part of it." A shrug. "Nothing's turned out the way we thought. The way _you_ thought. I was supposed to get close to him – well, I did that, and it's closer than anything I've ever had in life. Too close to let go of anymore. And all that exposure to us that was supposed to turn him - what it turned him to was me."_

_"What's next?"_

_"I start investigating Blenheim – and hope it doesn't draw attention to me. I was afraid to even come here, you know. It puts you in danger – everyone."_

_"It's Central Park. It's – central. No one's watching."_

_"I'm just so scared. You would be too, if you thought your boss was a terrorist psychopath."_

****

End of Chapter 12


	13. Hoping It Was a Lie

**13. Hoping It Was a Lie**

"No you're not."

"You're little, I'm big. Try and stop me."

"You're not coming with me, Greg."

"Aw, Mom."

"I'm doing this alone."

"Then you'll have to handcuff me to the bathroom sink."

For show – he hoped – she pulled out the pair of cuffs she kept at the bottom of her handbag. Time to get loud.

"I'm _not_ letting you search Blenheim's apartment alone! I can help –"

"I know how to search an apartment, Greg."

"_So do I!_" You think that's what this is about?" The thunder in his voice made her spin on him. "I want to keep you safe, dammit! Your boss may be a terrorist – he may already have been part of Dirty May and now -" Then she was rushing at him to clap a hand over his mouth, more paranoid than ever since Kearney because the walls might have ears, but it quieted them both, as though her own stubbornness bled out when she touched him. She dissolved against his chest, weak, shaking her head at herself. He could smell her hair. In the three days since seeing her with her father, a certain knowledge had entered his skin, a truth the average joe, he supposed, would never have the bad luck to grasp in all its pain – what it would feel like for the powers that be to tear someone you love away from you. He had watched them together, separated for seventeen years by an injustice, and his breaths had come shorter ever since. They could take her away from him too. He understood why she had said that about the camps. He could almost taste the horror, like a coating of bile down his throat. He knew she felt it too. Always these moments, stiffly courageous only to melt into him the next second. Sex had become a fever pitch for them; they were manic in bed, mining each other's bodies, stretching close afterwards to talk about anything and everything, with no thread to the conversation, each rambling on about whatever came to mind. Non-sequiturs that went on all night. Sensing they had to discover everything there was to know about each other before their time ran out.

When she looked up the dry tears were in her eyes again.

"Let's fight later," she begged.

"I'm going with you."

She nodded, reluctantly, and picked up her bag.

He drove. Evening light lingered in the streets; the days had become long. "Blenheim goes around the corner for take-out about this time," she told him. "At least he has the three days I've watched. Takes a good half-hour."

"Have you found out anything new on him?"

She grimaced. "Funny, I thought I'd get at him through his marriage records today. He's always told everyone he was divorced, even went on to a few people about how messy it was. But there was no record. He's never been married, much less divorced. Why would someone fake marriage and divorce?"

"To appear normal."

The people they passed on the streets seemed ghosts in the waning light, detached from them, ignorant of their terrible concerns. That was another lesson he had learned – how heavy a truly momentous secret could be. He hadn't even logorrheaed this one to Wilson this time, and the weight of it had made him bow his head whenever he passed the oncologist's open office door the last few days, sensing the dark-eyed gaze following him.

Ailyn was slipping an object from her bag. It looked like a foreshortened gun, with steel needles of various shapes that could be inserted where the muzzle should have been. "Park here," she said. "Put your shade down." She did the same. Ten minutes later a man left the apartment building across the street. Ailyn stiffened and he felt the chill leap across to him. "Guy's like clockwork," she muttered. "He's the same at work. Everything in perfect order, all the time."

"The sign of a bent mind."

"Think so? I'm still not sure about any of this. Blenheim's got all these references, worked his way up through CA for the last fifteen years. He didn't come out of nowhere. He's got a pedigree going way back."

"Pedigree is appropriate."

"I just mean he's well-connected."

"You can be well-connected and still be unhinged."

Blenheim had disappeared around the corner. She led the way to the building door, which opened in four seconds flat, her skill with the pick-gun impressive, then up a flight of stairs to the apartment door. Five seconds. She eased it open just as he made the top of the stairs, having beaten his own record by arm strength alone, swinging all his weight furiously on the handrail, not about to admit he might slow her down. He was already sweating. The sheer audacity of what they were doing – so much more dangerous than his puny B&E's – made his heart almost code. The guy could have a live-in buddy terrorist she knew nothing about, or come back early because his dinner-bucket was closed. The kind of risk he and Foreman had taken often enough, but there were too many factors here, and they involved people a little more desperate than your average suburban housewife. He sensed his hands itch to hold a gun. It was a novel feeling.

The only word for Blenheim's apartment was spartan. Functional furniture in dark hues, hardwood floor. Stylish, if there had been enough items there to hang a verdict of style on. A sofa, a small bookcase with texts on Christian history, the rational choice, he noted, for someone working in CA, and yet ambiguous. Two other rooms led off a hallway. Ailyn was moving through them briskly. The place had no lived-in feel. Every burnished-wood surface was spotless. No socks over chairs, no plate with its half-eaten pastrami-on-rye under the sofa …. _Stop comparing him to yourself_. No papers. That was the odd part – not a scrap of writing beyond the books. Ailyn had come back to the living room after ensuring the other rooms were empty and began a systematic search, pulling out each book from the shelf to riffle it and replacing it with the knife-edge precision Blenheim had ordained for it. She motioned him to continue on the next shelf, and when he turned he saw she had approached a long bare table at the back of the room, another oddity as it appeared to serve no purpose. With small square cloths she swabbed various sections of the surface and bagged the results. "A friend who won't ask questions can run tests for explosives residue," she explained when she saw his face.

They attacked the kitchen and the bedroom. More spotless precision. She stirred through the sugar and flour canisters as best she could without dumping them out. ("A great place to hide things," she told him. "Really?" he replied). In the cutlery drawer the spoons were spooning, each laid sideways to fit exactly into the next, the same with the forks, and they stood for a moment gazing down at this display of analness, in silent agreement that they did not like Blenheim. On to the bedroom. The bed had been made by his dad, he decided, on one of his more military days. Ailyn kept her eye on her watch. "Half an hour's not half enough," she muttered. It was like a surgery that could leave no trace of itself. Seconds were wasted putting things back in place. Ailyn glanced at him. "How did you know we searched your place back then?" she asked. He shrugged. "Piano bench was pushed in an inch too far." She nodded thoughtfully.

The bedroom desk finally yielded papers. Tax returns almost made Blenheim human. Work-related flotsam, commendations. He wondered what service above and beyond duty looked like in a place like CA and decided he didn't want to know.

The bottom drawer held a bulky manila envelope. The first item that had looked even halfway secretive. Ailyn slid the contents onto the desk, sheets of paper that looked like bad xerox copies and a large thin book, and then she was backing away, a hand to her mouth, as though she had dumped out an envelope of tarantulas instead of a book. It was the terror he'd seen in her at Kearney. He stepped in front of her and examined the book.

It was a high-school yearbook. Andrew Jackson High, 1989, from some place called Honey Brook in Pennsylvania. Feeling sick, he thumbed through to the N's. Nealy, Aimee Lynn. She wore the obligatory feather boa and a smile that said she was happy. A soft blonde teenager, on the brink of adult life. Just barely recognizable as Ailyn McCullough. Her face had changed, but the eyes were the same.

_Fuck this._ Every sound wafting through the apartment was loud, the slam of a car door rising from the street, a clock that ticked on the wall. He thought he could hear her heart. "So Blenheim knows who you are." His own voice startled him. "Ups the ante, I suppose."

She was still struggling for breath. "I should have guessed," she finally whispered. "He looked so funny when I made the suggestion about visiting Dad. So – knowing." She was shaking now, remembering. "Charlie even told me Blenheim thought my eyes were shifty. That they – reminded him of someone."

"Your dad. And so he orders up the yearbook to make sure."

She let out a laugh-sob. "And since everyone knows Mike Nealy's face, it doesn't even prove he's Blackwell."

"No. But I bet this does." He held up a blurry photo that had been among the xerox copies. A student cafe perhaps. A younger Mike Nealy sat at a huge table filled with books and the odd backpack, while the students around him, men and women, smiled into the camera. One young man, with black hair and a wedge-shaped head, was twisted toward Nealy, with an expression that cried for attention. The gaze of a troubled child to an ignoring father. Nealy was looking away.

A sound came from the other room. It might have been another noise from the street, or a neighbor in the next apartment – he knew apartments as empty as Blenheim's could echo oddly – but she panicked, stuffing the contents of the envelope back in, only seconds for a quick glance at the other papers – they looked like blueprints of a building, he decided, with all identifying lettering removed – and fumbling to put it back in the bottom drawer. He stopped her hands. They were shaking. "He's not here," he told her. "We're still alone." He took the envelope from her and rearranged the contents in their original anal order, with the photo last, and replaced it in the drawer. "We still have five minutes," he pointed out. She was shaking her head. "It's cutting it too short," she replied. All her nerve had left her at the sight of the yearbook. And so it was back out the door and down the stairs. Just as they reached the bottom of the stairs, the door to the street began to open and stopped halfway. "Not on the steps," a peevish male voice said to some one they couldn't see. A child answered, too muffled to hear, but Ailyn was already pushing him toward the back of the hallway, her whispered "Hide hide hide!" not words as much as a hiss of air. No time for cane maneuvering, he skip-ran the ten feet, his thigh screaming protest that exploded up his spine. A niche at the top of the stairs to the basement lay in shadow and she pressed him into the tiny space, their bodies close, chest to chest. "Because I said so," the voice added and the man came in. Instead of heading up the stairs, he stepped to the mailboxes and took out his key. They were feet away from him. Ailyn had stopped breathing. The pain from his sprint had reached his head, wave after wave searing through him, worse because he had to stand still and let it wash over him. He thought he would pass out. He tried to concentrate on Blenheim, languidly sifting through his mail. It was the first close look he had had, aside from the blurry photo, and he knew why Ailyn had been so certain the mashed-baby description was her boss. Blenheim pursed his lips over one of the letters, accentuating the effect, then turned away and disappeared up the stairs with the bounce of a man who paid a good gym a wad to keep him in shape. They heard his door open and close.

Ailyn laid her forehead against his chest, the first movement she had allowed herself, then raised a hand to count off five interminable seconds, before leading him out the door and to the car.

****

I have a right to this.

This is the way the world should be, this well-ordered realm that is mine. Its rules and understandings. Where an ant crawling across the floor would be crushed immediately, an affront to the silence that is this perfect repose. Where this thinnest coating of dust on the table - these almost imperceptible streaks in it I have apparently made without knowing – foolishly has been left to accumulate only because I have been busy lately. And quickly wiped away.

Love, _they_ say, the highest edict, (_he said_), but it's not it's _not_, it is this – that a religion concocts these bars to hold us in, the safety of the cage, rules you will all live by when I am finished with you. I will build my house of nails, have built it already, every sharp point sticking up in my realm of pain, thousands, leaving free only those paths you may trod on or be impaled. This image, so central, that _he_ would never accept, though I pointed it out to him over and over: nails, the violence done to a body, this is the wrathful, the vengeful lord, the message to us. Well, he learned.

… If they do not wish it, it must be imposed upon them.

For the greater good.

You _have_ learned, haven't you? As will your daughter. You, there, head turned away as usual, this photo what I have of you, to be viewed daily once and only once at this moment when the dark is moving down, and which I see I have – foolishly, as with the dust – not put back as perfectly straight as you should be. I am slipping. This burden… They will not help me. I am a storm that has passed, my plans are thunder from far away. Thy ignore it and drift on to other, peaceful means. They go over to the side of _love_. I can't even touch _you_ anymore. No threat of pain now to make you confess to something you didn't do, make them close a chapter, loosen up, put them off their guard. They're afraid you'll die. But your daughter is close, and ignorant. I can teach her how useless love is, that it will only kick you in the throat in the end. That it cannot save her.

She will learn.

****

As soon as they were back in Greg's apartment, she threw up in his toilet.

She could sense him watching her from the bathroom door, as though a comment were immanent, but when she turned to wash at the sink, he had shuffled back down the hall.

Tensions were traveling through her like toxins, fears that were free radicals bombarding her from the inside. When she slept she dreamed of her father, a thousand fragments of image, the cataclysmic event of having seen him again diffusing through her REM mind; she was running from the prison with his younger self, they stood in a charred city, the old broken man in the wheelchair who could not be him crying to them for help, on his lap a bomb - of the Road-Runner type, fuse sizzling - placed there by Blenheim.

And then seeing her yearbook was like the bomb exploding. There had always been that possibility – that someone would put two and two together and come up with a terrorist's missing daughter - but it was the thought of how long Blenheim – _Blackwell_ - must have known, weeks, months perhaps, passing her desk with a pressed-lip nod, even sitting across from her and her team talking to her about leads, the bland snake face with its snake eyes. _Did you already know when you ordered me to arrest Greg?_ No change in him she could remember, nothing that would pinpoint a moment of discovery. He might have known forever…

_Might have sought transfer to head of your section because he knew._

She leaned against the bathroom door, stomach vapor-locking again, until she had fought it back under control.

In the kitchen Greg stood very straight at the counter, watching a shot of brandy he hadn't touched. That straightness in his spine, the strength it implied to her, even if no one else believed in it, made her want to cry. She could never convey to him how important he had become. He was her only source of strength, her religion. When he looked up she saw something was wrong.

"You're going to leave now, aren't you?" he asked simply. Before she could recover and shake her head, he went on: "I mean, it makes sense. Get the hell out of Dodge." He shrugged. "Disappear before Blenheim can roll on you."

"He can't go public with me because I'd go public with who he is."

" –Just go to ground and pop up somewhere else as a different person, right? Hey, you've done it once –"

"No, Greg –"

"- I guess the next time you'll be what? – Annie Lee? How about Annie Lee McNealy – I like the ring of it -"

"_Stop it -_ I'm not going anywhere."

The intensity of it knocked him out of his spiel. "You can't stay here just because of me, Ailyn -"

"Yes I can."

"It's too dangerous!"

"And dangerous for you if I go. Blenheim must know about the two of us if he's been watching me. If he told them about me, they'd assume you knew where I was hiding. It would be information to get out of you." The thought was sobering enough to make him chug the brandy in one gulp.

"Look." The liquor had hardened his voice. "This thing's always had an expiration date on it." _Don't go there_. "Ever since you walked into my office. You were CA then, and now you're…a bunch of other stuff that makes it non-viable. We're going to be separated by this thing someday anyway." His eyes were suddenly red-rimmed. "I'm a doctor, Ailyn. I know what it means to draw out something terminal, and I know what it means to get it over with fast. The latter is infinitely preferable. And I'll at least have the comfort of knowing you're safe. So go on and – vanish." He spoke the last word to the wall, the brandy – it had to be the brandy – making him sound as though he were being strangled.

_Such a non-believer_. "Greg." She waited until he looked at her. "Do you know what a one-time pad is?"

It took him a moment to understand that it was her reply, that she would not argue anymore with him about staying, because she was staying. The relief made him stand up straighter, watching her for a long time. Finally he said, "I assume we're not talking feminine hygiene." She waited. "Cryptography. Codes. Don't know how the one-time pad works."

"I do. I'm going to create one with you, small enough to be hidden around here. It might even look like medical data to someone who'd never seen a key like that before. If –" She swallowed. "If I'm ever gone, I'll get a message to you."

The choice of _gone_ was a poor one, it sounded like funeral-speak, and he acknowledged it by pouring himself another shot. She realized she was exhausted; the cozy messy warmth of his kitchen, the dirty-dish towers in which things probably lived, each chair wearing its own cast-off shirt from the week, all of which would have usually relaxed her, left her now chilled because they stood in it talking – so mundanely - about capture and death. She thought of the shadows in the niche at the top of the basement stairs, where they had hidden less than an hour ago from Blenheim, pressed hard against one another, not moving, and she suddenly longed to be transported there again; it seemed – insanely – a place they might stand for a moment, in an interstice outside of the world, inside a perfectly balanced, immobile peace at a point no one crossed and where they would thus never be found; that this snatched, safe moment might be made to last forever. It made her think of Blenheim and then her yearbook, the spoon-in-spoon mentality that had hidden what it knew of her behind a pursed smile while it probably planned its next killing, and then it was all too much, fear overload, and she was sobbing, holding up the doorjamb, while he watched, that specimen-under-the-microscope stare she had come to understand was his defense against the emotions of others, until he couldn't stand it anymore and limped to her, almost lifting her with his hug, muttering "Oh, crap," not at her but at the thing that had hurt her.

"- and he must _hate_ Daddy and he's sick in the head have you ever had someone hate you who was sick in the head?" He wasn't going to answer that one. She tried to draw breath. "And he hates me I'm sure by proxy, and you." She was babbling between the sobs. "He mentioned hating someone once, he was almost catatonic about it –" She shuddered through her tears, thinking of Blenheim in the two-way mirror room, lost in his reptile memories while she pretended to detest Greg House for his arrogance. She had thought little of it at the time, figuring there were a lot of people someone like Blenheim would hate and that the feeling would be mutual. She knew now Blenheim had been seeing her father's face. "He might do anything," she rasped. "He would use either of us against the other, anything he knows about us is fair game." More sobs tendriled up into her throat, and down into her stomach, nauseating her again because the real reference here was the camps, the miles and miles of lined-up barracks kept in off-limit desert areas in the southwest, a photo of which she had seen once in a classified report, rows of teeth in a skull. It would break him to be sent there _because of you_, break every bone in his body from the inside as he detoxed and then starved - not physically, they fed them, humane enough – but because he could not buckle under. Like certain animals a cage would kill him. Starvation by despair. _Because you couldn't leave him alone_.

It welled up inside – _my fault my fault_ – sheer terror now, she was sobbing again, no coherent thought left, only the will to hold him. She moaned, "It's all my fault," his "Shut up" too gentle to stop her – "I'm scared for you, Greg. You shouldn't be mixed up in this. It was wrong of us to get you involved – it was so wrong!"

In the hush of dusk around them they were abruptly a tableau, frozen, unreal. His hands had stopped moving in her hair. The shock of her own idiocy lamed her, even the sobs chopped off, only her heart still going crazy, a wild animal that had clawed its way up into her mouth somehow; she would bite it dead, bite her tongue off and then everything would be all right.

After a long moment in which she didn't look at him he finally spoke. "I suppose," he said, words like ice, "by _us_ you mean you and John Galt?"

When she pulled away he let her. The noise that came from her was the animal. All the moments in the last months when she had thought _He will hate you_ rose now inside her, the lies roiling in her stomach, and she stumbled back to the bathroom, put her forehead on the door and waited. Nothing came. _He will hate you. Now_. After a long time she heard his thump down the hall and then his voice beside her.

"I saw how you reacted when your dad mentioned Galt." _Too smart_. "You cut him off. You didn't want it brought up." She forced herself to look at him. His face was a mask, sawn out of a single piece of smooth wood, but anger moved it from below. "Look, Ailyn – you think I can't take this? This is the way it's been from the start. You reveal something to me that's either a lie or only part of the truth, say between 10 and 50 percent because that's all I rank at, and whenever you're in the mood you reveal a little more, bump me up in the ranking. I figure I'm about in the 87th percentile truthwise now. Why should this be any different?" The fierceness in his voice said it should be. "Come on, bump me up. I get to lick your cunt, but I don't get to find out what's going on in that head of yours?" She wanted to say _Shut up_, she could feel her mouth open, but only sorrow came out. _This is it, this is when it ends_. The numbness possessing her was resignation. "Well, maybe I don't let you in on everything that goes through my steel trap of a mind either, Ailyn. I've had enough time to think about it the last week or so." He looked as resigned as she felt. "And it all makes some kind of flooey sense. I figure if your father's Nealy – then, what the hell, you ought to have a dentist brother-in-law in Schenectady who's John Galt. Am I right?"

The anger he had felt at being lied to she could see evaporating. He thought he could accept this latest deceit of hers. Because he didn't know what was coming. "Would that be so bad?" she finally murmured. The air it took to speak burned in her throat.

"To have a brother-in-law from Schenectady?"

"I don't have a brother-in-law, Greg. I don't even have a brother." _This is so hard_. "But James does."

It took too long to register. She had hit him so many times, just slapped him in the face metaphorically – the moment outside the interrogation room when he understood she was locking him away without his pills, or when she had told him about her father – but this was worse. His face said it. It wasn't her, or not her alone. It was his friend, slapping him without even being there.

He said, "No." He shook his head. Slowly the slapped look spread to his eyes. After a long unbreathing moment he said, "I've met Wilson's brother."

"You haven't met his other brother."

_Slap._

Then she told him everything, the extent of Wilson's manipulation, the part his brother played, her own part in it, while he backed up until he was leaning against the opposite wall as though driven there by the fists of a rabid opponent. He looked at the corners as she spoke, the lamp overhead, his mouth fumbled at a smile again and again that turned into a grimace _Hey this is a good one I've haven't heard this one_. _Where's the punchline?_ And always, always shaking his head. Her life was draining from her; she would feel no nausea when it was over, would never feel anything again once he left her.

"He wanted to help you, Greg."

"You and Wilson," he fought out, "you knew each other before you ever walked into my office."

"We were only introduced after James came up with his plan, after the underground group heard that Daddy was asking to see you about his heart. That was coincidence. But John Galt had a brother named James and James had a friend he had been wanting to tell about his beliefs for – so long. Because he thought it would help him. And he wanted to help him _so much_. He thought if his friend were exposed to Christianity he would accept it for himself. And he could help the cause at the same time, because if this famous doctor friend came to understand that Norxylam was really clozapine, if _he _went public with it, it would mean something."

"And you were the…_bait_."

"I was only supposed to watch you, nudge you in the right directions, Greg. Report back on what you were thinking – " His face made her stop.

"So - what? - every time I got a boner whenever I came too close to you, you and Wilson had little chats about it?"

"We talked about you, but it wasn't like that, we never thought –"

"No." His voice sounded as if he needed the toilet to puke in more than she did. It was his last attempt at denial, but it was useless. The phases sped across his face now, it was all true, and so she could watch the shock that had turned to disgust turn to bitterness, all in under a minute, record time for the death of a love affair. She felt her legs weak beneath her, waiting for his pronouncement.

"You bitch," he said.

She couldn't look at him. With her face turned to the bathroom door she said, "I fell in love with you." And then: "I love you, Greg."

He was already leaving -

"Greg, _don't go -_"

- banging through the rooms with his cane until he had his keys and helmet, no longer a body as much as a moving flame of anger. Clear where he was going. He left the door wide open behind him and she felt sucked out with him though she hadn't stirred from the cool wood of the bathroom door, a comfort against her forehead. She said, "Please come back."

****

End of Chapter 13

(A/N: I'm off to the States again for July, where I can never find the time (or the concentration) to write, so the next chapter in this won't be until mid or late August. Thanks to everyone for reading (and reviewing!)- Have a great summer!


	14. Beneath Your Wisdom Like a Stone

**14. Beneath Your Wisdom Like a Stone**

No Internet, to look up these subtle shifts in behavior, that would come later, no medical training to even peg it as a condition other than disturbing. That would come much later. Home from college, his brother cast a spell over the house, but it was not the gregarious, free-wheeling spell that had made the three of them the Wilson Wackos for years. It was car keys flushed down the toilet so their mother wouldn't leave the house; people from college were out to get him, his brother Danny told him, _they_ wouldn't stop at his family. It was discussions about outer space signals. He grieved, without knowing what it was he felt. The brother he had always adored was gone at nineteen, replaced by a conspiracy theorist who heard about plots against his life from voices in the night. It took two years for the family to say the word schizophrenic. Doctors were consulted, medications tried and abandoned. He blew in from his own first year of college to find Danny home before him, alone upstairs, their dad's hunting rifle aimed at the bedroom ceiling, one gaping hole already shot through the attic. _They're up there, walking around_, his brother explained. It was the moment his heart began to break. _Stay home when fall comes, Danny_, he begged him. _Don't go back to college. I'll stay home too and take care of you. Mom can't_.

_I thought you loved college, Jimmy. Wanna be a doctor and all that_.

Yes, to help you. _I don't need to get a degree._

_I'm not going back there anyway. They don't want me. I'm going to a new place. I applied and they accepted me. Hey, hear that?_

_Please give me the gun_.

The new place swallowed his brother. They tried for a year to find him once they realized it, following the intermittent record of classes attended on the Philadelphia campus, brilliant grades achieved for one semester only to be cancelled out by absences the next. No one knew where Dan Wilson had gone, he had faded away slowly, seen here and there and then nowhere; he was a drug addict, or devotee to a radical professor at the college, or simply homeless. The campus clinic had him down as having ceased to pick up his medication after a month. James was a doctor and married to his first wife before he saw his brother again. The call, the calm voice telling him a street corner in Princeton. It had seemed a moment removed from reality, all the more so when the familiar face that confronted him on the park bench smiled after hugging him and told him he was healed. Coherently, with a brush of his hand at his clean shirt and khakis, a light in his eyes that was stubborn, intelligent and completely sane. This was the miracle, Danny had said there that night, this belief he had found through a professor, this thing called Christianity that had wiped the madness from his mind in a way no medication ever had. He was a member of the underground, a non-violent organization, like a rhizoid system spread across the country. He was part of the upper echelon because the head of the organization, the professor, a man he admired more than anyone he had ever known in his life, had chosen him as a natural leader. _Because that's what you are, the real you, back now from the sickness_. After that first night they met and then met again, and some simple logic in the moral system his brother expounded began to speak to the doctor specializing now in oncology. Not mushy sentimentality or a crutch to help him over having to watch people die, but a kind of principle of caring, one that touched an inner part of him somewhere and melded and which worked in real life. In spring of 1989 he told Danny he considered himself a Christian.

Dirty May blew the world apart. He didn't see his brother for fifteen years.

_It's been hard going, Jimmy_. The park bench was cold. The face in the evening gloom was vigilant, though tired deep beneath the skin, unfamiliar lines revealing a similarity to their father he had never noticed before. _We can't meet here often_.

_I was afraid you were dead_.

A jogger came out of nowhere and passed. His brother started. The doctor in him watched for illness, but there was none, only this natural tendency of his brother's to be spooked because of who he was. John Galt, startling news because it was a name everyone had heard. No, there was no schizophrenia; the miracle had held. It was the conspiracy theories that had become real. They conversed, trying to catch up on fifteen years, and when a figure beneath a lamppost a hundred feet away stirred as though to approach them, Danny stood and turned to melt away in the other direction. _Don't go_.

_I have to_.

_I want to help. Tell me something I can do_. In the dark that had fallen he could make out only the hand still alight on the back of the bench.

_Maybe there is something. You're a doctor. Give some thought to this, and I'll contact you_. And he told him about the Norxylam.

Grief stayed. And fear. Because his brother was lost to him after all in a different way. They would never sit down together at a New Year's feast or bounce each other's hypothetical children on their knees. He would wait for the sporadic contacts, hope the news never reported John Galt's arrest. As though that last night in the shadowed park had infected him he would start violently at cars backfiring, fear slips of the tongue, never dare to walk into a Christian Affairs building. The rattle of the chain on his apartment door as he sat late at night, cheap door on the cheap and lonely dump he had found after his third wife said _Out_, would only remind him he had forgotten to lock the deadbolt; it would bring him to his feet, as it did now because it was not someone passing outside who had stumbled against the door – _it was happening_. They had come for him. As he gasped the door rammed open to the length of the chain. He felt light, no blood in his extremities. A weight threw itself at the wood now, a body, and the still-functioning part of his brain wondered why they had no battering ram, just as it was aware there was no way out for him but the deathtrap fire escape outside the window. They were using a cane (_a cane!_) now to pry the chain loose, it flew off with a pop – the door, freed, banging back against the wall – and he felt for the desk where he had been reading to hold himself up, because he knew it was going to be much, much worse than being arrested.

_"You bastard!"_

Greg House looked dead. His face was gray, with blotches of red rage high in his cheeks. He stood only a second, then slammed the door behind him and began to work his way toward his friend, screaming obscenities. The cane was an extensor to his anger. It swatted a chair aside and with a swoop cleared the remains of dinner from the table. Dishes shattered against the wall. Every swipe of the cane punctuated an accusation – "_You lied!_" – books flew from the shelves – "You _used _me!" Long ago Wilson had had a patient who had reacted to the news he was dying with the same explosion of violence, trashing his office in kill-the-messenger rage. He had run from the man to call security then. Funny, he hadn't thought of that in years. There was no running from this. _Stand still_. Papers from his desk fluttered in his face now, scattered by the cane.

"You _manipulated_ me!" House might have said _raped,_ the hate in the word was so palpable. The cane swung up again, this time aimed for Wilson's head. It took all his strength not to put his arms up. To keep his eyes open and wait for it.

A shudder ran through House. His eyes came back online. As though the pose made him aware of where he was and what he was doing he fell back with a tiny gasp that might have been surprise. The cane withdrew. "Defend yourself, dammit!" he yelled.

"Yes, I did all those things," Wilson answered him.

"I've called CA. They're headed here."

It was a pathetic attempt at a bluff. "No you haven't."

"_But I could!_ You ass, you think you pulled off a good one, don't you?" The anger was a child's anger, twisted to fit the bitterness of a ravaged adult. He could only nod. "I was a _tool_ to get what you needed! Was there one real second this past year? All those conversations we had, all that advice - even _one _second that was real?"

"It was all real –"

House had braced his hands on the back of another chair and he flung it now in the direction of nowhere, the broken child, with a man's strength. "You and Ailyn pretending to hardly know each other when she came around the hospital! Listening to me spout dreams about her melting when I bet you knew her medical history by heart." Another helpless nod. "Or New Year's Eve at my apartment. Pretending to be surprised at the clozapine results. You – _you_ –" No word seemed sufficient for House's anger. "And always advising me not to get more involved, _not_ to visit Nealy again, because you knew – _you knew_ – it would push me to do it, if only out of stubbornness."

"And you did." How well it showed he knew House lay unsaid.

"_Shut up!_" House ignored it. "You knew about Cameron, that it was her I met in the park, before I ever told you. You had more reason than anyone to be worried when she got involved with Chase and you let me rant on about it. Not one second real – every conversation _fake_!" House's voice dropped abruptly, a hard ball of ice that chilled him. "And you egged me on with Ailyn. That night in my apartment, on New Year's. Telling me –"

"No." He was shaking his head now. _Not this_.

"Telling me she felt something for me. When it was all a set-up."

"No. I thought if I said that, you wouldn't do it. Same principle. Reverse psychology. I didn't want all that, House. I thought it would be bad for both of you. I could see it coming - the things she'd said about you, what she felt –"

"In all your little secret conversations about me." The icy voice frightened him more than the cane had.

" – but it wasn't supposed to happen. Talk to Ailyn about it. Do you think she wanted to fall in love with you? No one ever _wants_ to fall in love with you." The rush of his blood seemed loud. "It just happens."

For a long time they were silent. "_Why, _dammit?"

He understood the question. "Because you've always reminded me of my brother."

"What - the schizo?" So Ailyn had told him everything. "The terrorist being sought by every cop in the country?"

"The man who's living his principles even though it puts his life at risk." The man who had found peace in a belief.

"And what about your principles, Doctor Wilson? What about junking a life friendship, lying and manipulating just to get what you want? Where were your principles then? Knowing you were putting me in more danger the more I got involved! Even arrest, just to further this cause of yours –"

"The arrest wasn't supposed to happen – Ailyn did everything she could to protect you -"

"_Three days of jail! _All for what? So I could be manipulated into going public about Norxylam and you would have one of your little tipping points."

"It would have made other doctors think! You combine an astonishing reputation as a doctor with an astonishing reputation for never being bought off. A public statement from you and people would have started looking into it –"

"It was _using me_, pure and simple."

"It wasn't! It was…" What it was he couldn't say. _Trying to wake you up_. There had to be words. "Look, maybe this is more about you than you think." It was what Ailyn had said in the restaurant. She had had tears in her eyes. "It wasn't just the Norxylam thing. I thought – I _really_ thought – Christianity might help you. It cured my brother of schizophrenia. And I wanted to help you. I wanted – things to stop hurting."

House barked out a laugh, clutching the cane even harder. "Oh right. God's got this shitload of replacement parts and I get issued a new leg if I only accept him."

"No – but your leg's not the only thing on you that's broken, is it? I was thinking of your mind." Before it was out he knew it was the wrong thing to say.

"_My mind's my own!_" The cane rose and cracked down on the table. He had seen House rages often enough to know them, but the wild fractured look in the blue eyes told him this was the real cause of the anger this time, the one unforgivable sin - not that he had been manipulated for someone else's ulterior motive, but that he had been manipulated to help himself. "Damn you, I'm not your patient!"

He wished he had his own cane to raise; he would beat it into him. "Yes you are, you idiot. You have been for the last five years."

In the sudden quiet a car alarm went off on the street outside and was silenced. They were still looking at each other. He began to understand something else.

"That's the thought that bothers you the most, isn't it?" he said. In House's grimace he saw he was right. "Because it makes it all meaningless. Thinking everything I've done and put up with since your infarction and since Stacy left you was just what I would do for any patient because that's the way I am. And now seeing it as a religious belief makes it worse." The grimace had become numb denial. "Compassionate and long-suffering doctor is that way just because he's a Christian. He only cares about you on principle. Only your friend because it's the right thing to do. Not because of some particular charm of yours." House looked as though he wanted to shake his head and couldn't; he had turned to stone, the rage in his cheeks all siphoned off, pale and suddenly worn. "That's the thought you can't stand, isn't it? That's why you have to make fun of any caring gesture I make, to you or to anyone else. Because if I'm the kind of guy who keeps a good-deed-of-the-day list, then that makes you just another task to be checked off." His head felt hot with understanding. "Subtract the friendship factor between us and there's not much left, am I right? Sort of takes the fun out of having jerked me around all these years too, I bet."

"Get out."

"This is my apartment."

In defeated confusion House turned. "Right, I'm leaving."

Sick despair hit him. "You're not a patient, House." The figure hesitated then went on, pushing scattered books aside. "You're not a potential convert." House stood at the door now, his hand on the knob. "Just – take something from somebody for once, won't you? Accept that someone might l- might care about you enough to want to help you. For your own sake."

House looked back. "You know something? You're the screwed-up one. You're the addict here. You're addicted to helping people. That's your crutch and you couldn't live without it." He opened the door. "Well, I'm not going to enable you."

"My brother wants to meet you."

His snort was incredulous. "I don't even want to see you ever again. You think I'd agree to meet your wacko brother?" Then he was gone, leaving the door wide open behind him.

He bent to pick up a book at random, make a start at cleaning up the mess House had made, then a weakness hit him in the back of the knees and he sat down on the floor, in the middle of the debris.

****

_It's a principle_. This black state of mind, the rage – like the cloud over the head of a cartoon figure – was its own kind of principle, and it had made him grab the bike after Wilson's apartment and head nowhere, the nowhere being Atlantic City, had made him take the same room in the same hotel he had shared with Ailyn on their married-couple weekend. He lay and stared at the ceiling stain almost the exact shape of Texas that they had laughed about together. _You think principles are important – I'm staying away from both of you on principle_. Lying on the cool bed he felt attenuated, stretched until he was insubstantial, an exploded diagram of himself, his heart back in Princeton where Ailyn lay, his brain over there at the hospital, needing cases, anything to keep it from circling around all the ways he had been manipulated, all those garden paths he had been led down. He recalled joking to Cuddy after Cameron's arrest that even Wilson might be a Christian, full sarcasm mode since the very thought had been absurd, and the memory was like the feel of dirt in his mouth, gritty, because he had been so stupid. Always telling himself he was no one's fool when he had been Wilson's fool all along. On his abdomen stood a bottle of Vicodin, rising and falling with his breath, and he poured the pills out on his skin now to count. Eleven. It had been three days since he left (and he hoped they were looking for him frantically). Three days of not being a good deed for James Wilson. He wondered how Foreman was on writing scrips and the despair of it choked him. He was dependent in so many ways. And he was damned (such a fitting phrase) if he would go back to anyone for it. There was a principle at stake. Wilson had salved his own conscience doubly for years, telling him to get off the stuff and then writing scrips when he thought it would ease his pain, the good doctor getting to feel good about himself either way. It was one thing he could take away from him.

He got up and flushed the pills down the toilet.

The dizzy spell that hit him as he watched them spin away was from skipping lunch, he told himself.

He forced himself to shower, and ordered a clean shirt brought up through the concierge. Dinner would be something other than bar nuts. When he stepped out Ailyn stood at the end of the hall.

Her face said she had worked on a hunch, not knowing if she would find him there. She looked as though she'd been chasing ghosts and not sleeping. Pretty much what he'd been doing, but she still looked beautiful with shadows under her eyes, whereas he looked like shit on a long skinny stick, a fact the mirror had confirmed and which not even a new shirt could hide. He stomped down the hall until he stood in front of her, caught the clean scent from her, laced now with panic. "Don't say you love me or I'll hit you," he warned her.

"I love you."

His bluff was being called a lot lately. "You don't love me enough."

"It feels like too much."

Yes, that was what it felt like. _So cut the dosage_. He couldn't. He wanted things to be simple, a linear progression to human feeling he could cut off at the source whenever he wanted to, just yank the drip line out, but it was never that way. Their feelings were tangled up in each other, an ingrown vascular system. It felt right to move closer to her and then their foreheads were pressed together, eyes closed, a habit it would seem, like some trite sci-fi flick involving telepathy, two aliens with the ability to share each other's thoughts. It felt like a release.

"Tell me I'm on the same page as the rest of you now," he begged. "Really, really on the same page."

"One hundred percent truth rating, Greg." When she looked at him with tears in her eyes he felt himself at the center of things, the still peaceful center of a place he had tried to reach all his life and always floundered at the edge of. "All of the truth," she said, enumerating, "is that I love you, and I want to be with you for the rest of my life, and - I'm scared right now my life might not last very long."

He felt a chill. "We'll see that it does."

They stood for a long time entwined, needing the stillness. A couple dopy with booze exited the elevator, giggled and passed.

"Greg, you have to forgive James," she finally murmured.

"Do I? Can't I just go on being friends with him instead?" It made her smile. "You know, I just did something fantastic." He told her about the pills.

She touched his face, nodding in surprise, and it was praise enough. "Maybe we'll both live a long time," she said.

****

(AN: Why is it hard to write in the summer? This was a short one, what with vacation and all, but I hope they'll pick up now - )


	15. A Better Place When It's Upside Down

**Chapter 15: A Better Place When It's Upside Down**

"Remember that I lied to them too in a way." Ailyn sounded as nervous as he felt. She smoothed the dashboard with one hand and let out a deep breath. "Turn here. Because I'm my father's daughter they think I'm a Christian the same way they are, that I work with the underground out of the same convictions they do. You're the only one who knows that's not really true."

"Your dad knows. But who's he gonna tell?"

"It's the Marriott here. Room 211." He parked the car and they sat listening to the engine tick.

For a week they had circled around what to do, exhausting late-night discussions that led nowhere. For a week he had tried to stretch his head around the strangeness of it all, not helped by the detox - the fact that his life had taken a wild left turn at some point into what others would – if ever given the chance - call terrorism, if only in the form of aiding and abetting. He would have called it that himself a year ago. Night sweats and dreams of explosions propelled him from the bed while Ailyn slept, and his kitchen in the dark became unfamiliar to him, cabinets rearranged; he couldn't feel surfaces, only his leg on fire and giving off a faint glow. At the hospital Cuddy wrote him a scrip for buprenorphine with a frown and no questions and the dreams stopped. Wilson watched him with a blank dismal stare at every opportunity, their interactions limited to the kind of curt exchanges on medical matters he might have had with any other hated enemy, but they were sniffing one another out, he knew, like dogs that had bloodied each other in a fight, until one day he found himself sitting across from the oncologist in the cafeteria cadging his lunch of turkey lettuce wrap and discussing the Norxylam problem with him as though it were his latest case. Two bloodied dogs, so used to each other's scent that they eventually lie down together back to back, the animal brain forgetting all quarrels. He looked up and saw that Wilson knew it too.

"You know, anyone else would call this short-term memory loss."

Wilson looked right at him. "I don't know what you're talking about, House."

"That's the spirit."

"Actually you may be on to something." Wilson gazed at the crumbs on his empty plate. "I have no memory of having eaten my lunch."

Life was always being strange and it never gave you time to adjust, always hurrying you on to the next strange moment while you pondered how you had come to be there, in his case hoisting himself up the stairs of a Marriott behind his lover to meet the most well-known unknown Christian terrorist in America. Then he was in the room with John Galt and it was all so normal as to be banal, Wilson introducing them, a handshake, chairs pulled out. Galt – Dan Wilson, he kept telling himself to think – sat on the bed. His best friend's brother whom he'd never known existed. The older Wilson had an intelligent, inquisitive gaze that stayed reserved, respecting boundaries. There was a family similarity, but the face was craggier, a hard bony aspect that applied as well to the body beneath the cotton shirt and jeans. Whatever base note of nerd always adhered to James Wilson had been left out of him. This was not a guy who would wear a pocket protector.

He watched for signs of illness as the man spoke, but there were none. The former schizophrenic's thoughts didn't race or jump. He had no delusions of grandeur, unless crowning himself secret king of the Christians counted. He apologized for the manipulation, a forthright statement that made Wilson jumpier than his brother.

"Danny, that's been taken care of."

"Dr. House should decide that." Galt looked at him and waited.

It was time for some manipulating of his own. "I hate you," he told Galt. Not exactly a true statement. The guy reminded him of Nealy, like and dislike too close to call. "I hate what you stand for because it messes with peoples' minds, and we don't need more messing with." He hadn't meant to say _we_. Wilson and Ailyn both looked dismayed that he was going into in-your-face mode so fast. But if he thought he could anger the man into revealing his true character he was wrong. Galt gazed at him unperturbed, almost pitying.

"_I_ hate to point this out, Dr. House, but your hate's just a drop in the bucket." For a second Galt was thoughtful, his eyes going to the window as though contemplating all the millions whose loathing weighed on him anonymously and without reason. It made the underground leader look vulnerable, suddenly needy of protection, and he told himself it was only the similarity to Wilson that made him feel that way. "I'm sorry you can't accept all of it right now," Galt went on. His glance at Wilson said _Drop it_. "Let's cut to what you can accept."

That simple. Like a good therapist, taking it the opposite of personally, turning it back on the patient. Your problem, not mine. Galt was a younger version of Mike Nealy, he saw - the guy had probably learned at the master's knee how to exude that quiet strength, or maybe he was really like that. In any case it was so just right it took his mental breath away. He gazed around at all of them, Wilson and Ailyn, Galt watching him, and thought, _Would you people stop being so likeable?_

On the agenda was Blenheim-Blackwell. "We have to be sure your boss is really Darren Blackwell first," Galt told Ailyn. "Maybe get a photo to Mike in prison somehow and have him confirm. And even then –"

"Blenheim _is_ Blackwell!" It came from Wilson. "He's responsible for –"

"And even then," his brother repeated, his calm voice silencing Wilson instantly, "it doesn't mean he's responsible for Dirty May. All it means is that he was someone who propagated violence in Mike's group. Blackwell left before I ever joined. He may never have had contact with any of it again. He may have joined CA because he really changed his mind and wanted to work against Christians. Be rational, Jimmy." The simple command expected obedience and got it. Wilson was already nodding. _It's his older brother_, House told himself, _naturally he admires the hell out of him_. Would do anything for him. It didn't stop the envy. "There's nothing illegal we can get Blenheim for right now."

"There's plenty he can get me for," Ailyn spoke up.

"How are you holding up?"

She told them how she was mostly avoiding Blenheim at work - easy since he'd assigned her to a different group - because she wasn't sure she was good enough to act casual in his presence.

"You're like two people with pistols at each others heads right now," Galt mused. "All you've got is a description of him from a convicted terrorist and all he's got is a yearbook with a picture that looks vaguely like you."

"It's a stand-off," House summarized. "Neither is going to pull the trigger any time soon."

Galt nodded at him appreciatively. "What we need is someone who can watch Blenheim full-time. Follow him, see what he gets up to when he's not being the big CA man. Someone who's trained at that kind of thing and wouldn't be loyal to CA." He turned to Ailyn. "There must be someone like that you know."

"There is. His name is Robert Chase."

House had gladly forgotten her pink-cheeked ex-partner after saving his life. The Australian had resigned from CA, he knew. He hadn't worked for the past six months, Ailyn told them now, obsessed instead with tracking down Allison Cameron and the Christian group that had swallowed her – not to expose them, but to find her, talk to her. Perhaps let himself be converted.

"He's been butting his head against all the walls we've put up," she explained. "Following leads to other cities and trying to join the underground, only to be 'exposed' as an undercover cop and thrown out. As per your orders, John." Galt nodded. "But I think it's time we let him in. There's no more loyalty to CA left over in him. Robert hates Blenheim. He blames Blenheim for convincing him to go try and arrest Allison rather than just talking to her, that it was Blenheim's fault she vanished like that. He feels manipulated." House stirred beside her. "He doesn't know anything about my connection to all this, but if I went and explained it I think he would help."

"If you think it's right, do it," Galt told her. "That leaves only what you think is right for _you_ to do." He had turned the subject to House so quickly it caught him off guard. They were all looking at him. "There's that original reason you ended up in this room in the first place, Dr. House." _Yeah, because life likes to play practical jokes, the stranger the better_. "Your reputation - and Norxylam." He paused. "If you plan to publish, or make a statement on the drug, we should talk about it, coordinate, but…" Galt bit his lip, another gesture so human and vulnerable it astonished him. "You don't strike me as an anything-for-the-cause type of person."

"One cause I'm always for," he replied, "and that's myself." He felt the hand beside his on the chair and he curled one finger over hers. "And Ailyn now." _Prove it_, the moment cried. Not words about love. When he turned to her the fear of surrendering rushed him hard and he had to blink. _Say something you've never said to anyone before_. "Tell me what to do," he told her, "and I'll do it."

He hadn't realized how tense she had been. "I think you should wait." It gushed out of her, grateful. "Wait until we decide what to do about Blenheim. If you go public with the Norxylam now it will only draw attention to you. It might tip his hand and make him think he has to do something about you. It could get you in trouble with the authorities and…take you away from me." There were things she was afraid to say too, he saw. "And I need you here."

"That's it then." He turned back to Galt and Wilson and made a game-show buzzer sound. "You lose."

Galt was already standing. "Your decision, Dr. House. It always has been, you know." He gave him a slight smile. "Ever since you came across that information in the library."

He was going senile, or the drug use had fried too many brain cells. "You were there." The sudden memory arose, the man in the station next to his. He had barely glanced at his face.

"I sat beside you. I was going to prompt you if you didn't find the right paths to research. Pretend to look over and be interested in the subject. But you got there on your own." Outside the motel door children ran down the walkway screaming at play. Far away a police siren started up. Sounds of alarm in the packed bright world out there that hated John Galt, but he didn't seem to notice. He was taking out his car keys. "I'm glad I got to meet you officially, finally. I've wanted to for a long time." A look, that intense honesty again.

"I – uh – can't say the feeling was mutual." He wanted to add a name and then realized he didn't have the faintest idea which to use. John or Dan. Mr. Galt, which would have been downright smarmy.

"I've got to run." Galt spoke to Ailyn for a moment about Chase, confirming details, names of contacts who needed to be informed, and then turned back to him. "We'll talk again, Dr. House."

He didn't nod.

****

They lay in the cool of their sweat (night soothing the panicky July days) and he ran a finger across her scar, the tucked-in skin that always seemed close to opening for him, kissed her mouth and neck. He was still inside her, deflating. When he slipped out she clutched him to her. _Say it, Ailyn, whatever it is. I can take the punches now_. He had sensed some unspoken pressure building for days, on top of all their other problems, making her turn and lay her forehead against his chest at odd moments when they were alone. He knew her too well.

She stood and went to the bathroom where he heard her splash water on her face. When she came back she sat cross-legged on the bed and he sat up facing her, straight and straitlaced and waiting. If she needed the interrogation room posturing to get it out he would humor her.

"I want to marry you," she said.

His mind did the mental equivalent of falling off the bed. When it crawled back up, he had to look for his mouth. "That – may be the best terrible idea I ever heard."

"Not the way everyone does," she explained quickly. He saw that she was close to tears. "Not with the Life Registrar's Office and all that. I know we can't do that."

"And I was already flashing on you in a white dress. Me in a tux." She was hugging herself, shaking her head. "Rice tossed in front of the Registrar building by crowds of our friends."

"John weds Christians." It took a moment to parse. "My dad used to tell me about it. Christians have always married in secret weddings, with their own rituals, even if they already have an official Registrar wedding. You know I don't believe in everything the same way they do, but this just…seems right." He was touching her now, smoothing his open palms up and down her thighs as though to keep her – and himself - from floating away. "We're living a secret life as it is." He nodded. "We might as well be married secretly. I…want to be your wife, Greg."

He didn't know how to tell her she already was. How her presence in his life had made him forget all other women as if they had never existed, someone named Stacy who had once been important to him, and others farther back. All other concerns wiped away, the bitterness that had been a wasteland in him buried under the avalanche of _her_. There would never be another woman for him. It just seemed right.

"Okay," he told her. She was holding her hand over her mouth, surprised, smiling through her tears. "We'll get hitched, woman." _I'll be your husband_. The thought so dizzying he thought he might slip off the bed for real.

****

Another motel room, in a Ramada this time, on the edge of Trenton, the August heat like a slap. He felt ill-prepared, a condition he usually relished as being proof he couldn't care less about whatever it was he faced. "Do I wear a tie?" he had asked at home. Ailyn wore a silvery sheath dress and bolero that seemed severe. "Do what you want," she had told him. He had ironed a shirt.

The room was full of people. Not a crowd, he realized, maybe twelve but they filled the tiny room. It was a deliberate tactic, he grasped immediately, to seal his pact with the underground by having these strangers witness his wedding, but it still shocked him for a second. Wilson had opened the door, fighting a grin. Ailyn was being hugged by people he'd never seen. From the back Robert Chase approached him. The ex-cop had someone in tow, and his mind did a little flip when he saw her.

"I still imagine you in a body bag," he told her. Cameron hugged him and he pretended to grimace.

"Thanks for saving my life," she said. "I know you hear that a lot, but this time it has nothing to do with your doctor skills. More with how well you knew your way around the morgue."

"Comes from eating my lunch there all the time. Gives my PBJ that extra pungency. So, what are you two…?"

They held up rings for him to see. "We went through this last week," Chase informed him gleefully. "After your bride-to-be helped me find her."

They looked so young and disingenuous, gazing at each other, that he couldn't help the sarcasm. "Wow, if I'd known that, I could have asked you for advice."

Chase glanced at him. "I would have told you to wear a tie."

From behind him Ailyn said, "There are very few people who can tell Greg House what to do." _And you're one of them_. "You're not one of them, Robert." After hugs she asked Chase about Blenheim. The Australian frowned.

"He goes to work and comes home. He goes around the corner for take out." Chase shrugged. "Never makes private calls. There's been nothing suspicious since I started the surveillance. There's always the possibility that he's had something in the works for awhile and it's going to go down without his micromanagement. Or maybe he was never planning anything other than to ruin your life, Ailyn." The Aussie had a point. Revenge against Nealy for some perceived insult might be all Blenheim-Blackwell wanted. The college loner who joined Christianity on a whim and was kicked out. Who had the chance, with the information in his hands, to get back at the guy's daughter twenty years later. Had to be a spider at heart to have that kind of patience. _I wouldn't even hold a grudge that long – probably._

Then Galt had arrived, strewing silence over the room, broken only by quiet greetings; handshakes and male back-patting hugs, working his way toward the wedding couple. In the stillness the air-conditioning was loud, the machine laboring. A funky kind of wedding march, he supposed, to go with the butt-ugly chapel that was the room with its cheap hunting prints on the walls and suggestively stained bedspreads. In some perverse way of course it would make the moment more memorable. Few people could say their wedding started with someone chain-locking the door. All banal if not for the invisible hand that gripped his throat, the revulsion he felt for ritual and social amenity, exceeded only by his revulsion for authority, and which seemed to be closing in on him now as Galt approached and he tried to breathe out. _What have you gotten yourself into?_ Then he and Ailyn were sitting on the edge of the bed while Galt stood before them with the guests ranged around, and he realized that without ceremony the ceremony had begun.

Ailyn had told him Galt came up with his own rituals, recombining traditions from every era of Christianity as he saw fit, that the two weddings she had had the chance to witness had both been very different. Galt gazed down at them on the bed now as though just giving thought as to how to proceed.

Then he knelt before them.

The little "Oh" that escaped from Ailyn told him it wasn't standard procedure. The crowd stirred. "I kneel before you to honor you," Galt said. "It's a courageous thing the two of you have come here to do. Maybe the most courageous thing in the world. Making an oath that you mean to keep for life. In a world that won't acknowledge it. That's going to work against you all it can." It was not speech-making. Galt might have been talking to them over lunch somewhere, with a hesitancy that said he was looking for the right words. House realized he believed him. "You command the highest respect for doing what you came here to do. We're going to acknowledge that even if the world won't."

They had rings. More ceremony. Rings they would take off before they left the room and only put back on when they were alone. His tongue felt too large, swollen by stupidity at the ritual he couldn't really believe in. When Galt asked them, in that informal way that made it less a rhetorical question and more a probing exploratory surgery, whether they wanted to really do this thing he stupidly replied, "I do," the formulaic phrase from a million Registrar weddings. Unoriginal. Belatedly he added, "Obviously." Then it was Ailyns's turn. Her "Oh _yes_" beat his lame reply hands down. They sat with their heads angled slightly toward each other, gazing down at their kneeling questioner, and he had a sudden notion they were watching the dark TV behind Galt, in a second they had grown old, twenty, thirty, a million years in the future, sitting on their couch after an adventureless evening, chewing on their dentures and a life well-spent together, and the simplicity of it both stunned him with joy and choked him because it might never happen.

The ritual wasn't done. Galt took a stoppered bottle from his coat and dabbed a glistening liquid on Ailyn while he muttered, performing motions so stylized and yet unfamiliar he could only guess at the patchwork Galt had needled together from forgotten tradition. Turning to him Galt sensed his reluctance. "Only if you want me to." He waited with the bottle.

"What is it?"

"It's water, Dr. House."

He shrugged. "Make me wet."

Then Galt was touching him with a moist finger, on his forehead and then his lips where touch became so intimate. "May Christ's words on love and marriage be in your mind, on your lips - and in your heart." A last dab at his chest, the open place at his collar where he figured a tie should be and which was nowhere near the heart. _Not too big on anatomy, are you, Dan?_ The water was three cool spots evaporating.

Life was very, very strange.

Wilson had the champagne out of the mini-fridge before his brother had turned away from the newlyweds. The room buzzed into movement, party time, the noise dialing down to subdued after a guest House didn't know suggested they didn't want neighboring rooms complaining and drawing attention to them. He stood with Wilson for a moment at the edge. "Dan's good at this, isn't he?" Wilson crowed. "I wish I'd had him for mine instead of the Life Registrar." House had seen Wilson's second two weddings, yawning stilted affairs both in the Trenton Registrar's Office, the red-draped dark-paneled room that had smelled oddly of old sneakers, as if to make a statement on the marriages to come. He looked around, at the people who believed in what they had just witnessed because it wasn't someone else's ritual, who were having fun in the equivalent of a small box, Cameron leaning back against a headboard with a glass of champagne and her shoes kicked off, and he had to acknowledge that it was better. "At least I don't have to circulate," he replied. Someone bumped him reaching for a glass. "Couldn't if I wanted to."

He looked around and he realized John Galt had slipped away. Like an intermittent symptom, popping up in his life and then vanishing again before he could diagnose what he thought about him. It reminded him of Ailyn when he had first known her and he suddenly needed to have her close. He plowed through the group, took her by the arm and locked her with him in the bathroom.

"Wha –?"

"Galt forgot the kiss. Plus where does he come off getting to perform all the rituals, wave his magic wand or whatever, his vial of holy water and say we're married?"

"You agreed –"

"I decide when we're married." He had his glass in his hand and on an impulse he dipped a finger in it and dabbed champagne on her forehead as she nodded and her lips rising into a smile and then her chest, the curve of collarbone there so white and subtle, and he kissed her.

"Wife."

"Husband."

****

The heat never stopped. She breathed through the pressure on her ribcage, the shakiness in her legs in the morning just stepping out the door. It was fear. The breaths that came too short leveled out when she was with Greg in the evenings, became long calming lungfuls as she drew him into her, always ending in a shudder in her hips. Her husband. She wanted to be with him all the time, lean on his chest. A glimpse of Blenheim down the hall at work would send her home early in the summer swelter, panicked, and Greg would be there, still smelling of the hospital. They would put their rings on together. Chase had told her nothing new could be found on Blenheim. He was a blank and looming slate. She found herself cleaning her apartment often, on nights before Greg was to meet her there, an airing out, throwing away her past and putting things in order. Carving her life down until it would fit in a suitcase if need be.

Time passed.

In late August a group of heart surgeons from hospitals scattered across the country were found to have started cutting themselves ritually prior to their most difficult operations. A slash on the fleshy lower arm, blood dripped into the scrub sink and then quickly rinsed away. The idea had developed at a conference where some of them had met, one finally admitted, and then spread, though no one could say who had started it, only that it worked. The surgeries went better. When confronted with the charge that the act might be a kind of religious insanity they were to a man – and one woman - vehemently outraged. One reporter called it "a growing – and seemingly human – need for ritual." He was fired from his job.

A renowned professor of anthropology named Julian Jaynes published a book with the provocative title The Origin of Christianity in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. A dissertation, unbiased and not relying on the theic anomaly, on why modern mankind with its two-sided brain might develop a need for a higher being. Banned and then released by the publishing review board after protests, it was read by more people than would have normally glanced at it. She watched Greg speed through it in the evenings, those savvy eyes widening and narrowing at intervals, and when he closed it on the last page and held it out to her she shook her head. He shrugged. He looked grizzled and yet happy. Lines that had been a part of his face seemed to have disappeared overnight since their marriage by John. He was getting younger and she was getting older, worn down by worry. They would meet in the middle perhaps, when it was over, and then start moving forward as one. Start to live their lives together.

She dreamed of her father at night, that he had escaped from prison and fled to her apartment, bumping into things as he tried not to wake her, and when she awoke she realized someone was in the living room. Greg's eyes flew open when she shook him. At her whisper he replied, "Cat?", then "Oh right, you don't have a balcony." "This is real, Greg," she half-mouthed. Another bump, a scrape of chair, from the other room and he was rolling off the bed and onto his feet while she did the same on the left side. He had the Seecamp from the inner pocket of his jacket in his hand, the pistol that was tiny enough for him to carry around without notice but which could be deadly if he aimed like she had taught him. A careless plan if whoever was in the living room was a friend, but he was too smart to panic, she knew. She had her own gun now and as they had often discussed she left him waiting in the bedroom, second line of defense, and moved through the dark. There was a shape in the living room where none should be, a blot of black against the moonlit window, someone seated at her dining table. She reached past the corner and switched on the light, bringing the gun up at the same time.

At the table sat a man she had never seen. Mid-forties, balding. He looked beaten down, was her first thought, rabbit-startled in the light though he must have been waiting for someone to find him, seated like that. Clothes that might have suggested homeless but were only thoughtless, she discerned, as though he had no energy left to spend on appearances. An unshaved, pinched face marked by a livid scar on his right cheek. Her eyes went to the closed door, no sign of forced entry. A lock-aid, she supposed, the same kind she used. "What are you doing here?"

"My name is –"

"I said, what are you doing here?"

" – Kyle Henderson." Her lungs were suddenly full of fluid. She couldn't speak. "I came here to tell you Blackwell's going to do something bad, and you've got to stop him."

***

Curtains closed, no light now except a dim table lamp. Greg had come in behind her instead of waiting, the Seecamp pointed down and ready, and she had given him the no-go sign. "He's one of the three on my list," she had explained. "The one Daddy said didn't belong in the violent fringe." She kept her gun in her hand. They sat in the ring of yellow light and listened to Kyle Henderson tell them the secret history of the last seventeen years.

Of course Blackwell was Blenheim. (Henderson's voice had the same pinched quality as his face, a boozy fear, as though he could barely keep from looking over his shoulder even if it was just at a wall of books). He and Teddy Gaites had left with Blackwell after Nealy kicked them out, the three of them then moving into ever more radical circles for years, Darren Blackwell always pushing them to get involved in the next big plan that would free America from its tyrannical government. Religion hardly an issue after a while. They would separate, hear about and from each other. Drift in and out of action. Until 1989.

"This plan had been making the rounds. I mean, this was the most radical time, a lot of hardballers at the top of these groups. It's why your dad would have nothing to do with them. And I – when I heard about _this_ I just…_couldn't_, man. I went to ground. I mean, you didn't tell that kind of people Hey I'm sitting this one out. They would have killed me then. But Darren – this is the story I heard later – he and Teddy – _they had volunteered to be carriers_." Nausea had frozen inside her, a cold lump. "The financing finally comes through on the suitcases." The suitcase bombs, she thought. "All on a higher level than Darren or Teddy were ever given access to. But then two days before it's all supposed to happen, Darren suddenly disappears. He was supposed to be Houston. They had to get someone else." It was monstrous, these banal words, the evil evoked in that whiney pinched voice. She wanted to climb across the table and strangle him, bloody her fingernails in the flesh of his throat, or lift the gun – it would only take an inch – and shoot him. The cockless bastard had known and had warned no one. Forty-thousand.

He must have seen something in her face. "This is just what I heard later, you know. I swear, I was completely out of the loop." He paused, haunted. "Teddy went through with it." He swallowed. "He was San Francisco."

"And Blackwell chickened out." Greg's scornfully quiet voice beside her vibrated inside like microwaves, warming her back up from the absolute zero she had reached. "The guy's an evil bastard, a mother of the first water, until it's time to put his life where his mouth is. Until it comes down to converting his body into a fine ash in a millisecond." Henderson was nodding.

"But you're still in contact with him," she managed to get out. "Now that he's Blenheim."

"We hooked back up. He found me. I – wasn't going to be a part of it anymore, I'd decided, but he's…persuasive."

"For the easily persuaded," Greg said.

Henderson didn't get it. "It was always a small group. They had scattered after Dirty May and a lot never showed up again. Others just started to drift away, they didn't have a taste for the violence anymore." His voice dropped to significant. "Only Darren." She shuddered and glanced at the curtains to make sure she had closed every chink. "It was his idea to infiltrate Christian Affairs after it was established, become someone new named Blenheim. He had the skills for it. Now he works from the inside. It's me and him and a few contacts I never get to see. He knows about you. Aimee." Greg's hand shifted to cover hers. "He picked up some contact of yours, Rick I think the name was, and had his goons beat information out of him – where you met, how you'd started wearing a wig –so Darren could send one of his own to meet you, but you got spooked." Henderson stared toward the front door, spooked himself, tangled in thought. "Darren tells me about his job, see."

"Is Rick dead?" She wasn't sure she wanted to hear the answer.

"Who – oh, the guy? I don't know."

The rage was like electricity twitching her hand. She would have shot him if Greg hadn't tightened his grip.

"That's it, see?" Henderson went on. "Darren as Blenheim can use his position to do almost anything he wants, but the underground's not behind him anymore. They're all going in the other direction. This new guy, this John Galt – I mean, I've never met him, but he's such a force, deradicalizing people, pulling them onto the side of non-violence, going about it a different way. Darren's the only one who still talks about blowing things up, but no one's listened for a long time. I even stopped listening."

"So we're back to where we started," Ailyn said. "What are you doing here?"

Henderson's haunted look deepened. "Probably getting myself killed. If he finds out I came here. But I can't live with it anymore. I couldn't think of anyone else to go to who wouldn't have me arrested. Darren's not just talking anymore. He's planning to set off a bomb, really planning this time, and last night he told me he has it all ready. He's going to blow something up and it's going to be soon."

****


	16. If The Boys Wanna Fight

**Chapter 16: If The Boys Wanna Fight**

She was pacing. Sketching a line from Greg's piano to the kitchen and back again while he and Wilson gazed, silent, from the couch. An evening had arrived, though it was still bright outside, evening with its implication that they had done nothing. We _did_, she told herself. They had contacted Galt, spent the day in fact talking back and forth with him and others, the brunt of which was that he would arrange for an anonymous tip-off about Blenheim. Hopeless, she knew. As hopeless as her father's attempts to warn authorities before Dirty May. Blenheim was too powerful; any tip involving him would be buried, or at best ignored as being a Christian plot to cast aspersion on a good CA agent. She and Greg had left her apartment when the sun finally came up and had come back to his place, neither able to go to work. She had watched him grab a half-used bag of frozen peas from his freezer compartment and start to crumble it into a dish, a sign she took to mean either he had nothing left in the house to eat and was going to call that breakfast or that the worry had finally done his brain in, until she saw the baggie of Vicodin hidden inside. She stopped his hands before he could open it. He had been clean for two months. "I'm in pain," he told her. "We're going to get the bastard," was her reply. "Somehow." He went for the booze instead, pouring himself a drink the equivalent of ten shot glasses and when she suggested he might want to keep his head clear, he scowled. "Look, the doctor has diagnosed Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Let me medicate my way."

They had brought Wilson in late, only calling him toward evening, and he had promised to come by. It was seven. He looked like he had been on the way to a best-dressed contest. Black tie, the camel-hair coat tossed over a chair. He kept running his hands through his hair, but his questions were reasonable, ordering, making sense of it all.

"It's not a dirty bomb. You said that, right?" It was the third time he had asked. She stopped pacing.

"It's conventional, according to Henderson. Ammonium nitrate. Which any farmer can buy as fertilizer."

"And which limits the killing power, luckily," Greg added. "Radiation is what killed most people in Dirty May. Conventional would only take out hundreds as opposed to thousands, depending on the building. Maybe this is Blenheim's way of taking pity on humanity. He should get a medal."

"Henderson told us Blenheim couldn't get hold of a suitcase bomb," she continued to Wilson. "No one even knows if any exist anymore. Ammonium nitrate was Blenheim's choice and Henderson helped him buy a lot of it, but he doesn't know where it's stored."

Wilson was shaking his head. "This guy didn't know much of anything, did he? And why did you let him _go_?"

She had hated doing so – Kyle Henderson was the link who would have proved her father innocent. "If he had disappeared from the scene, Blenheim would have gotten suspicious. Henderson thought that was already why Blenheim had started to leave him out of the details – because he sensed his conscience problems and was afraid he might talk. That's why Henderson has no idea when or where it's supposed to happen." She watched Greg retrieve the almost depleted bottle of bourbon from the piano bench and pour himself and Wilson the rest. Wilson downed his. "He thought Blenheim hadn't decided on a building, but he figures something big in New York. I had Blenheim's apartment tested two months ago and the results were negative for nitrates. That could mean he's putting the bomb together somewhere else – it would take a lot of room – or he hasn't started assembling yet. We – may have time." Greg's scornful look told her she was being naive.

"So our hands are tied," Wilson summed up. "What are we supposed to do – just go on living our lives until we hear on the news that something went boom?"

"Do an inside job on the bastard," mused Greg. "Assassinate him yourselves before he can act. Except real Christians don't kill, do they?"

"No," Wilson replied, his thoughts elsewhere.

"Not into all that violence. Aside from venerating a guy who was slowly tortured to death. Someone's hot idea, let's make all the blood-and-gore details a central image of our religion…" He was just spouting, she knew, it was his way of thinking, but when he trailed off she turned. He was studying Wilson with a cock of his head. "You always wear black-tie to your discussions on clandestine terrorist activities?"

"If you ever stopped playing with your balls in the office, House, and paid attention, you'd know there's a gala fundraiser at the hospital tonight. I was headed there when you called."

Two seconds ticked by, enough to transform his face as she watched, then he was bent over the coffee table pounding it with his fists. "No, _no_, I forgot the gala!"

"And your tux is still at the cleaners?" She felt light-headed with stupidity; his face was a mask of shock. "I think we've got other ways to spend our evening, Greg."

He had jumped to his feet. "_How_ could I have been such an idiot? I _saw_ it! I had it in my hands!" A word spumed inside him, triumphant and full of despair at the same time, the pressure forcing tears to his eyes. "The _blueprint_!"

A draft came from nowhere, lifting the hairs on her arms. Maybe she had left a window open.

"The blueprint in Blenheim's apartment!" As if he didn't already have their stunned attention, he beat his cane on the piano bench. Beating away his own shock. He was crying now, the burned-red look around his eyes that matched his parched voice. "All the lettering had been removed and I only glanced at it – but I _know_ now –" He took a breath. "It was Princeton-Plainsboro!

He's going to blow up the hospital!"

***

Lights turned PPTH into a happy cruise ship afloat in the warm dusk, partygoers inside caught glittering in various poses of chatter or mirth, and he felt the word _Pretty_ peel off the top of his head like a premonition of grief as he skidded the bike to a stop and half-fell off. Ailyn slid off from behind him and ran ahead. When he reached the lobby after her she was already conferring with the receptionist and then she turned and shook her head. Wilson had been calling in the warning before they were even out the apartment door – the cops should have been just as quick as his bike, at least one unit.

Which meant their warning was being ignored.

Impossible to imagine Blenheim could have a stranglehold on 911, but he could have planted seeds ahead of time, told colleagues in key positions to expect a hoax. Ensure a slow reaction.

Maybe he was wrong about the blueprint.

Through the guests milling in the lobby he could see the bulk of the gala crammed into the main reception room, a crush of overdressed and bejeweled bodies, and he pushed his way toward them, through the open double doors with their raffle-ticket sellers, blazing a trail of outrage as he knocked drinks in faces and jabbed toes with his cane. He used a chair to climb onto a table in the middle. Adrenaline got to him and he slipped halfway up, thigh twisting in a silent shriek of pain and one knee coming down to shatter a china plate, blood through the tear in his slacks instantly flecking the white shards. Then he was up, with one hand over his bleeding knee and the other raising the cane high for attention. He could see Foreman turn to stare, Cuddy behind him aghast and then merely disgusted.

"All right, listen up!" It cut off the last of the chatter. "Anyone who bought a raffle ticket here bought a chance to be blown up." The silence became deafening. "There is a bomb in the hospital. _This is not a joke_." Movement rippled, near and far. "Get out while you can, people!" So he wasn't sure, but he was never sure, _this is one of your diagnoses_, yelling fire when there wasn't even smoke, only a blueprint of smoke (_only your memory of a blueprint of smoke, you idiot_), being safe rather than sorry. How many times he had wanted to climb on the conference-room table like this and yell at his fellows about a diagnosis they refused to believe. From his vantage point he could see the skittering his words had prompted here and there in the room speeding up only to slow down. There were too many PPTH doctors among the guests and they were a restraining force. Baxter from the rehab center and Ayersman from surgical. They all knew him. He could tell from their scowls they had all decided he was drunk or just out to wreck the evening. When they didn't move the others stopped. "Don't do this," he moaned. "I'm not lying." _This time_.

_Cuddy_. She stood at the table's edge, having fought her way there, probably to try and talk him down or threaten him with security. She had heard his moan. Alarm clicked in her eyes.

She believed him.

And she was smart, he knew. She wouldn't be where she was if she wasn't a fast thinker. In a second she had clambered onto the table with him, lifting her long green gown above her knees to do so. "He's right!" she cried. She threw out her arms in both directions to point – the door that led through the chapel back to the lobby and the emergency door to the parking lot. "Exits on three sides!" she yelled. "Not everyone to the main doors. You - throw open that emergency door – it'll start the alarm!"

It started the alarm. A swell in the ocean of people, a tidal roar that surged like lemmings toward the main doors. _The Titanic is sinking_. For a moment he was hugging Cuddy as the table was rocked, then he was down, fighting in the wrong direction, until he could lurch through the chapel and pop out in a relatively uncrowded part of the lobby. He spied Ailyn. She was helping security cut a swath through the streaming gala guests to make room for ambulatory patients, already pouring out of side clinics on the ground floor. The next second he saw Robert Chase had joined her. She had called her ex-partner from her cell while she rode behind on the bike. He shoved his way to both of them.

"We've got to look for the bomb," he cried.

"Not our job!" she told him. She sounded breathless, red-splotched in the cheeks and pale at the same time. He could hardly hear her. Gurneys were starting to join the crowd as elevator doors flew open, patients from upper floors, whose nurses were following evacuation plans. Cuddy had made it to the reception desk and was using his high-point strategy, standing on it to direct her incident officers, one of whom was Foreman. "This is not a Defend in Place!" she was saying as he moved past, wrong direction again, toward the elevators. A door slid open and presented him with a mess of ropes and pulleys. An orthopedic bed. The nurse tried to wedge the patient out the door and the too-wide pulleys stuck. "I got him in but I can't get him out!" she wailed. "What you get for using the visitor's elevator," he snarled. He snatched the scissors from her breast pocket and cut through the ropes, lowering the patient's leg roughly, then pushed them toward the lobby. _Where are you going_? Alone in the elevator he jabbed the button for the fourth floor, watched the schizophrenia in his finger because it made no sense, if the bomb was big it wouldn't be hidden in his office, even if Blenheim wanted to hang this on him, and then he felt the rush of blood to his stomach as the elevator started _down_, the Murphy's law of elevators, but an eerie calm enveloped him. Sheer chance. It was right.

The door opened on the underground parking garage.

The garage was full of cars and deserted. _Amazing_, his calm thoughts spoke. _Not one moron trying to get his car and drive away_. All leaving the building above him on foot like they were supposed to. Then a clatter sounded on the stairs. _Ah, humanity, you disappoint again_. He turned to see Ailyn hurrying down, with Chase behind her. "I saw the arrow pointing down," she told him. She perused the garage quickly. "Good idea."

The elevator's idea, he refrained from informing her. Or something else steering them. Fate. There would be time to ponder it later, or there wouldn't, in which case it wouldn't matter. Nothing would matter. He pointed to a vehicle parked against the back wall of the structure, between shiny BMWs and Audis. "Tell me, who drives a delivery van to a gala fundraiser?"

They approached the van in a dream. His head felt wrapped in cotton. _You could still be wrong. Please be wrong_. He had never wanted to be wrong before.

He had called it a delivery van, and a delivery van might have been unremarkable for a hospital, but this was a rental truck, big and grimy yellow, the kind you slapped your cheap furniture in when the bank foreclosed. Robert Chase ran a hand along the back double doors, fingering the handle and examining it with a penlight. "Let him," Ailyn murmured. "He's had training." Her hand on his arm hurt; it would leave marks, he figured. Chase opened the doors.

Barrels. Lined against one wall. Chemical drums. Ailyn and Chase were both talking at once. He had hyperacuity, sudden onset, senses flitting to record what they pointed out as they said it. "Shaped charge," Ailyn was muttering. "Lined against one wall and curving around. Conventional J formation." Her voice sounded filtered. From behind his penlight dancing across the drums Chase added: "Had to reinforce the floorboard - extra boards, see – there and there – to hold the weight." She was nodding. "So it wouldn't break an axle, or make the van lean and call attention to it."

"Quite the handyman." It was his own voice.

It was all for nothing. They were kidding themselves. Nothing mattered except the sign. Chase's light that had played away from it each time it grew close came to rest on it at last, giving up, and they stood silent.

It was a hand-lettered cardboard sign, propped against the last drum at the back of the van like an afterthought. Large enough to be read immediately by anyone opening the back door. It said:

God is Great. Free my father. This is only the beginning. Signed, Ailyn McCullough. Aka Aimee Lynn Nealy

_Insurance_. In case the bomb was found and defused.

So Blenheim could be sure of exploding one life out of existence if he couldn't get hundreds.

His bladder felt abruptly full. Lethargy, like a toxin, warping him, the downward rush of coming off the adrenaline because there was nothing to do, either they left the sign for a render-safe team to read and report on or they let the bomb go off. His mind choked on the images like puke – all the emergency surgeries still going on above them because you didn't just schlep an anesthetized patient outside by his exposed large intestine, tumorectomies about to find out what invasive surgery really meant – let us blast it out of you with two thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate. All the pretty, panicked nurses diligently marking grease-pencil X's on empty rooms, rolling patients in blankets and dragging them after the gurneys ran out. All flying through the air, torn to shreds. Or Ailyn in prison. It was a non-choice, the absolute checkmate, and he would have admired Blenheim for his evil genius if he didn't feel like extracting the guy's heart out through his nose, then he had hoisted his hip onto the bed of the truck and was trying to stand so he could move to the back of the van and snatch the sign. Something held his leg, clawed at it. "_No!_" Ailyn was wailing, "there might be a trigger!" She embraced his thigh, crushed it, and black pain oozed in front of his eyes.

"She's right, House." Chase had his hands on his other leg. "A dead-man switch, a trip wire. It's possible. Take the weight of the sign off it and it detonates the bomb."

"We've got to get that sign!"

"I will. I know what to look for -"

"You –" They were all shouting at once, a miasma of echoes in the echo chamber that was the garage while sound filtered in from outside, sirens arriving at last. They all stopped shouting at once. Chase's "Because I can!" hung in the air last.

His throat felt too parched to speak. He couldn't look at Ailyn. "You tell me what to look for and then get out, both of you."

"No," was Chase's simple response. He was already climbing into the van himself, deftly, rocking it less than a cat would. "I'll meet you outside. Now go!"

"No heroes," Ailyn begged, softly, her face near his. "Please, Greg, no heroes."

Then they were hurrying up the exit ramp, bursting out into police lights and the clamor of a thousand pressed bodies. Night had fallen. The shadows milled, frightened. Cuddy would have called the disaster control center, top priority in an evacuation, and ambulances were already arriving to take the worst patients to other hospitals, blaring as they inched their way through the crowd. He stumbled through a ring of cancer kids all holding hands, felt Ailyn's hand in his own and it occurred to him where they had to go next.

"Listen –" He spoke in her ear to be heard. "Blenheim had his two-pronged attack – either the place goes up or he sticks it to you because they find the sign. Either way he's happy. If Chase manages to get rid of the sign, Blenheim's going to be one frustrated terrorist." She was already nodding. She knew where it was going. "I'd bet my cane he tries to expose you another way after this."

"The yearbook. He won't want to wait any longer."

"We have to get to his apartment."

His bike was near the entrance. A cordon of policemen stopped them, but Ailyn waved her badge, called "Hey, Charlie!" to a man at the far end who looked familiar and ducked past them. In moments they had the bike pushed through the crowd, past the cop Charlie's astonished questions, and were gunning away into the vast calm that veiled the rest of the city, heading toward Trenton.

***

Cool and very whacked because no one had actually found a bomb, but Charlie Dalton had seen it before, during his time in Chicago. Back then it had been a ten-story office building, evacuation chaos all on the basis of a call-in, no bomb ever found. And this wasn't even a call-in. Just a holler-out, if what the sexy, sweating hospital directress had said was true. He moved people out, helped sort patients into ambulances by the triage tags attached to them, red yellow green, all without thinking, deafened by the sirens - why couldn't they turn the damn things off? His ex-boss was suddenly beside him, Ailyn McCullough, looking more stressed than anyone there, with her braid all coming loose around her face, her boyfriend doctor – the one no one was supposed to know about because he had once been a suspect – in tow behind her. He watched them peel off on the boyfriend's bike, hardly answering his questions, and a bad taste shot into his mouth. His head felt plugged up. It had to be the exhaustion making him think his mondo thoughts. _I like you, McCullough_. Don't be involved in this.

Then Blenheim had shown up, all blowhard on top of it. The render-safe guys were huddling with him. Charlie sidled over.

"Can't give the All Clear until it's removed from the site, but it's defused." His skin crawling, Charlie listened to the head of the team tell Blenheim about the mother of a bomb they had just taken out of action in the parking garage. The night was suddenly hot; he felt the sweat that had grown sticky on him start up again.

Blenheim seemed unperturbed. "Was there any indication of who was planning to take the blame for it?" Blenheim's voice, which had always reminded Charlie of his whiney eighth-grade art teacher, sounded darkly alien now, anger checked at some deep level. "Any note or message?"

It was an odd question to lead with. Charlie could think of thirty-seven other matters that would take precedence. "No note," the squad leader answered and left.

Blenheim turned to find him at his elbow. "What is it?" he snarled.

Best to pretend he had heard nothing. "So did they find anything? Hospital lady's asking. Do we give the All –" He didn't finish the question. Past Blenheim's shoulder, through a break in the crowd, he had spotted Robert Chase. Not an earth-shaking sight, volunteers were turning up from all over. It was what the ex-CA agent was doing that made him stop in mid-sentence.

Chase had crouched beside the rain gutter on the far side of the street and was busily tearing a large square of cardboard into small pieces and feeding it down the drain. He kept his eye on the crowd as he worked, a regular windshield-wiper rhythm right left, and as he frisbeed the last piece into the dark slit and stood, his gaze snared on Charlie – and then the back of Blenheim. Alarm crossed Chase's face – and a kind of pleading, Charlie realized - then an ambulance came to a stop between them, cutting off the view.

Blenheim had noticed Charlie's stare and turned. Nothing to see. When he turned back his piggy eyes had gone the black of gunmetal. The pounding in Charlie's head worsened.

"Coordinate with Morley," Blenheim ordered him. "I've got something to take care of."

In the din of sirens and shouted commands after his boss left, he felt alone with his scary thoughts until a tap on his shoulder made him jump.

"Where did Blenheim say he was going?" Robert Chase asked him.

"He didn't."

They eyed each other for a moment, telegraphing what they weren't saying.

"It's like this," Chase finally murmured. "Ailyn needs our help."

It was enough. _Sort the good from the fucked-up later_. Charlie nodded and followed him.

***

His body was the bike, urging it forward down the road while she clung behind, pushing it to top speeds. The sign lurked everywhere – storefronts and billboards shouted her name. He couldn't tear it out of his head. The snake mentality it had taken to leave that sign – and he had known quite a few snake mentalities – was on a level he couldn't cope with. It shook him to the core. It was the never-before-encountered virus, insidious, so alien to their thinking that they had almost no chance of beating it.

Then they were in Blenheim's deserted dark apartment, moving swiftly with only Ailyn's penlight, and he couldn't help comparing it again to his own place, where anyone sneaking in would have immediately stumbled over three beer bottles and fallen on a heap of dirty clothes.

"Glad this guy's so anal," he murmured to her.

She flicked the penlight on her own face long enough to show him her grimace. Meant to be funny, but she looked scared.

The brown envelope was still in the bottom drawer of the bedroom desk. It was all they would have, their only chance. The yearbook, they both knew, was not that important. If Blenheim even hinted that Ailyn McCullough was Aimee Nealy, it would quickly be proven true – people who had known her in high school, medical or dental records. She wouldn't escape the accusation. Her secret had never rested on the perfect disguise, only on obscurity. No, it was the photo that was their bread and butter – their counterattack, the proof that Blenheim had been part of Nealy's group.

Ailyn shook out the envelope – and then shook it again. "No," she moaned.

"Empty," he said. _Like speaking a death sentence_.

"Empty," said a sarcastic voice behind them.

They spun as Blenheim switched on the overhead light. He held a gun pointed at them.

Adrenaline spasmed his heart. Vectors had lit up again. He could feel Ailyn grope behind her for her handbag, almost sense the cool metal of her pistol meet her hand, one vector, while his peripheral vision traced a second vector to his cane. He had left it on the corner of the bed. Blenheim was speaking.

"Empty because I'm not a fool. Those papers – minus the photo of course – are somewhere else. Somewhere to be found if anything were to happen to me." The terrorist's pupils were alight with glee, dilated, but he knew instinctively it was no drug. The guy got off on power – his revenge fantasy was coming true. "I'm going to call in and report two intruders," Blenheim told them, as happily as if ordering a three-course meal in a fancy restaurant. He stepped to the phone on the nightstand, making it necessary to pass close to them. Ailyn's hand groping in her handbag froze. "Then I'm going to shoot both of you in a tragic struggle before they get here."

***

_You are your own God_.

He was bringing final order to his universe. So the bomb hadn't gone off. The sign had been spirited away. _Yet your omniscience led you here_.

The Nealy woman had thought she could outsmart him, but in his veins ran strength and wisdom; he could feel it seethe now. Ever since he had realized one day in his office, contemplating those cold eyes, who she reminded him of, he had laid his plans and they led – if only circuitously – to this moment. The rules he had wanted to impose on the world would have to wait, but Aimee Nealy at least would die, along with her doctor friend, _and you dying there in your prison will hear of it and die. The grief too much for your poor damaged heart_.

She had never been a step ahead. Even now, fumbling with her purse behind her back, as though he wouldn't notice –

"Take the gun out by the barrel, Aimee. Lay it on the floor."

_Watch her do it_. The homely thing, all she had going for her was that fabulous figure, the sweep of hip and firm waist as she bent, face too much like her father's, the haughty look that made you want to slap it or press your lips to it. What did her doctor cripple see in her?

"Other people know about you, Blackwell," she was saying. "Your history's as explosive as mine. Kill us and they'll go public with it."

_Shake your head_. Don't show them that sliver of doubt, because that is all it is – a sliver. You were too careful in erasing your past. There would be no proof. "There's nothing to tell, Aimee."

She didn't frown. They seemed so certain.

And he had his hand on the phone, the first step – 911, get on tape who he had found breaking into his apartment, then the sudden shoot-out as she went for her gun in spite of his shouted warning, all recorded –

A noise made the three of them turn. Voices at the front door of the apartment, unidentifiable, not part of the plan, and Greg House's eyes, he saw, were wide with disbelief. The doctor was standing where he could see down the hall. His shock was too open-mouthed to be faked. "It's _Mike Nealy_," he muttered.

Impossible but there was that catch in his gut, not _you_, enough to make him pivot back around the bed toward the hall, _impossible_ outdone by sheer hope, words already forming _because I still have so much to say to you. You can watch me shoot your daughter_.

The daughter he took his eyes off for less than a second.

A scraping sound. He spun. She was fumbling the gun off the floor, but she wouldn't be fast enough, the strength in him boiling so high now, a divine heat to go with all that CA training,_ let her have it_. He swung his gun on her –

A whack of pain burst against his arm. The shot went wild. The gimp – he'd reached his cane somehow, brought it down against him, the strength in his swing entirely unexpected. Then another pop sounded and blood droplets licked the air. Someone had rammed a lead fist into his chest. Such a tiny lead fist in his heart. The daughter looked so funny. Big-eyed. _You didn't shoot me. You can't, I'm your God_. The thought made him happy. His chest was wet and when he touched his fingers to it they were red. _This is violence._ Someone long ago had wanted this, had prayed for it, and then run away when it was upon him. He was looking at the ceiling. A man bent over him, saying Stay with us. Fingers were unbuttoning his shirt. He located his hand that had held the gun and it was empty, then the dark came up his throat and shook him, once, like a dog.

***

It was the elevator going down instead of up. Fate guiding. Say anything, his mind had cried, something to distract him, and the knowledge had come. _Mike Nealy_. If he pretended to see Nealy coming in, it would blow Blenheim's twisted little brain, and it had worked, long enough for Ailyn to swoop down for her gun. Not long enough to stop Blenheim turning on her. Time became visible. The seconds till she died a space he could leap into, in all his years of medicine nothing had ever been so urgent. Sprinting behind a crash cart in his ER days or rushing to breathe life into a smothered infant, no movement had ever needed to be quicker to save a life. _Her_ life, which was his. Two bounds that were like dying as the pain from his thigh slashed up his body, then he had the cane and brought it around, not waiting to put swing behind it. It was enough. Blenheim's shot, thrown off, thumped the wall, no louder than a book dropped on the floor, then another book fell, Ailyn's shot, and Blenheim's chest exploded into a red rorschach blot. His face still held the gleam with which he had turned on Ailyn, manic glee, and when his fingers came away from his shirt red the glee intensified. The light of a world in which someone had touched him, at last, with the destructiveness he worshipped. Blenheim slipped to the floor, still grinning. _You're happy to die_, House thought. Then Chase and the cop named Charlie were in the room, guns drawn, staring at him as he knelt and tried to save Blenheim's life, useless, he could tell from the swamp of blood around his knees, hemothorax, the guy's chest a blood swimming-pool, fluid seeping now into the throat, choking him to death. He watched the terrorist's eyes go still.

The quiet was penetrant. When he looked at Ailyn, the shock on her face broke his heart. "You've never killed anyone before, have you?" he asked. She didn't answer.

"Is this line open?" Chase, always practical, had moved to the phone and was listening to it.

"He hadn't pushed any buttons."

"You two have got to vanish." Quickly Chase told them about the sign. "Charlie says he saw me, so someone else might have too. They could find the sign and piece it together. Things have been fished out of gutters before. It's not likely, but now there's – this." Chase's eyes avoided the body.

"You can both say you came in and found him like this, that there was no one here –"

"I'm not lying." It was the man named Charlie. He had been Chase's passive shadow up to then, reacting as one with him, absorbing the scene with a stoic bemusement that said no one had taken time to explain things to him. "I'm sorry, McCullough." He glanced at her. "Chase hasn't got a job. I still do. This is – too much. It's murder. I dunno the fuck's going on here, but they're gonna find out it was you and if I've lied –"

"Why should they connect Ailyn with this at all?" House murmured. "If we leave now –"

"My service revolver," Ailyn replied. Her voice was hollow. "They'll match up the bullet."

They were all ahead of him on that one. Cops, thinking alike. "I'll dig it out," he announced. "A pocketknife, come _on_ –"

The two men were shaking their heads. Behind them sounds had converged at the front door. A timid voice shouted in, asking if anyone was hurt. Neighbors. The shots had been louder than he realized.

"No time," Chase summed up needlessly.

"And there's still the yearbook, somewhere." Ailyn was coming out of her shock. "Probably with some statement about who I really am. There's video footage at Kearney of you and me visiting my dad." He could see _Your dad?_ write itself across the guy Charlie's face, slow realization that the shit he had gotten himself into went deeper than he had thought. "There are a thousand ways they'll get at me, Greg."

He didn't need more convincing. He stood and held out his hand for her, then realized it was covered in blood. "No heroes," he assured her. Then they were moving down the hall while she flashed her badge at neighbors who fell back to let them pass. A man was dead, she told them, it was being taken care of. They were good citizens to want to help. There was nothing they could do.

****


	17. It's a Cold and It's a Broken Hallelujah

**17. It's a Cold and It's a Broken Hallelujah**

Fighting was love. Every shout was an orgasm, every hurled cup a caress. How she had fought with her father once he revealed his religion to her, low-key bitter words she would regret years later. Because she loved him, but it was nothing like this. She was shaking, hurling herself through her apartment while Greg shouted. He had a voice. He had a mind that had made itself up. He was throwing things.

"We're in it _together_!" He spun and swept a vase from a table with his cane. It shattered against a chair. "You think they'll let me just go back to practicing medicine, tossing a ball at my computer all day, do you think I _want_ that? I'm – _coming - with – you_!"

Every word of the last sentence he beat into the wall with his fist. She had never seen his anger use anything except words, a medium he had perfected. This use of his body to express his rage, a child's impulse, meant he was cornered and knew it, that he had seen in her face how serious she was.

"You have a career, Greg." She spoke down into the small travel bag she was packing, in a voice that belonged to someone else. He had made her drop an item, his physicality roaring through her, numbing her hands, and when she picked it up it confused her, a knot of hair. It was the black wig and for a second she panicked, unable to imagine why she would be packing it. "You have a job. They won't associate you with Blenheim's death. There's no yearbook hidden somewhere exposing you, no bullet that's going to connect you with what looks like malicious murder." The panic had reached her throat. "You can go back to your life."

"_Life?_ What _life_, dammit? Haven't you understood anything? Do you think any of that _matters_?"

"You're supposed to reveal the Norxylam –"

"_No!_" Another whack against the table. "That was Galt's plan for me, not mine! And no one's going to believe me about anything anymore. I _am_ connected to you, they know it and they're not going to let it go! My so-called life at that hospital was over when I climbed on that table and said the word bomb – they're going to want to know how I knew. What am I supposed to tell them – someone in my terrorist therapy group had a breakthrough and confessed?"

It was true. She thought of Henderson. "You can tell them I deceived you, that I was involved all along and you found out." She knew as she spoke that it was absurd. "That you never knew who or what I was before this evening when it all fell apart and I left. You can make them believe it if anyone can, Greg. You've spent your life making an art form out of lying." The bag in front of her was full now, stuffed with useless wayward items for all she knew. _Snap it shut_. "If you want to try and save my reputation, you can tell them I regretted it in the end but was too scared to turn myself in. Either way it's safer for you than trying to live with me. I'll be on the run. I'm not going to put you in that kind of danger." _Look at him_. "I love you." His face was a mass of shock. "You're not coming with me."

"Then you'll have to shoot me."

It was the answer of course. She could feel her skin crumbling away with the chill of it. He was ahead of her, always smarter, thinking it through. And giving her no time, as he snatched her handbag from the bed and retrieved the pistol that had gone back into it after she shot Blenheim. When he smacked it into her hand and lifted her arms into aiming position toward him an "Aagh" fluttered from her, a sob. The room was suddenly blurred. He was whispering in her ear as he shaped her fingers into a two-hand grip around the gun. The barrel brushed his chest. "I was threatening to call the cops. I hated you for having lied to me about everything. I couldn't condone the violence you believed in, that had almost turned my hospital and everyone I work with into a heap of rubble – I might despise them all but not that much. When I turned around you had your gun out. You shot me and ran, without waiting to see if I died." The words were so simple they seemed to flip reality, as though it had already happened. She couldn't breathe past the spasm of tears swelling her throat. "After I recover I'm exonerated, trusted because I stopped the bomb, because I was trying to turn you in and got shot for it, and I go on with my …_life_." He spat the last word from him. "Make it good." Through her confused sobs she thought he meant his life. He had backed away. The gun in her hands was cold.

"From here." He took up position across the room. "I can't be too close, they can tell that kind of thing. Here, in the left shoulder, because you were aiming for the heart." His finger tapped the spot, twice, three times, until he was assured her eyes were focusing on it. "No lower, Ailyn, or you'll knick a lung. They know you're a good shot – and so do I – but you were scared, in a rush." He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and laid it on a chair within reach and then moved back into position. "Now."

It was the voice of authority. He stood hipshot, one hand on his cane, head up, no sign that he was waiting for a bullet to rip through him except for the compulsive blinking that began as she brought the gun up. No sign that the distance he had backed to might put her aim off a whole inch. This would be a caress too, he was waiting for it; he stood on a bridge, his back to the rail, and said "Please come home with me tonight," he turned in his office as she and Chase approached, the first glance at this man she was supposed to investigate, his height for some reason surprising her, long ago now. He stood in an interrogation room, the odor of four days in a cell still adhering to him, every hint of his posture screaming pain that he would do anything not to show. It was the body she had pummeled in sex, longing to penetrate. The blood that would burst from his shoulder, she knew, would be blindingly bright.

"You're shaking," he told her. "Take a deep breath first."

He knew she couldn't do it. That was the answer to his calm. He knew her better than she knew herself; it was his way – push until the pushee acknowledged their weakness and gave up. All the sobs left her. The gun dropped.

"I can't," she whispered.

He was already nodding. "I know." He recrossed the space to her in two limps. There was his body, his chest. She could lean into it. They would slip away into the shadows and she would have his strength to lean on. She wouldn't have to rely on herself alone. They could hide under stones if they had to and because they moved as one they would not be noticed.

"I'm leaving with you," he told her. She nodded.

A last glance through the apartment in case any part of her soul was being left behind, but there was nothing. She was washed free of it. They hurried down the stairs and as he stowed his cane on its holder in the bike he looked a question at her. "North," she told him. "Canada." Then they were moving through the night, under a vaporous rain that had begun unannounced, hissing past rain-shiny streets. His back was a wall always advancing before her, pulling her along as she laid her cheek against it and held on tight.

****

He reveled in the scent of growing things, rushing by his face in dark slaps through the wind of the bike's speed, yellow birch and pine, filtering through and then gone again, snatched away by the cool night breeze. Her body at his back warmed him. They had circled south of Trenton first to pick up cash from an ATM, her idea, in the hope CA would trace their card use and believe they were headed south, then it was a straight run north, wide open, the way he liked. They had halted once, after the rain stopped, to take their ponchos off and he had kissed her. Night and the smells had kept him from thinking too much. Never any use in brooding anyway - decisions were decisions and he had made a habit of never second-guessing himself. Other people did that often enough for him. They left I-87 after midnight, working their way through back roads. At a tiny gas station run by rats, judging from the trash accumulated, she put on the black wig after he parked in the shadows and stepped into the green-lit phone booth to make a call. "Lake Champlain," she told him, the weight of her warming his back again and they sped off. Dawn sliced through stands of basswood, surprising them, a new day.

They would stop at a motel for the day and rest, she told him, wait until night when their contact would spirit them over the Vermont side of the lake to Canada. He flashed on a boat running without lights, a memory of a single dawn fishing trip with his father during some halfway-happy interlude, and the prospect seemed peaceful.

Outside a hole in the road called Huntsgrove they took a room in a motel so run-down they had to study it from the road for a moment before deciding it was open for business. The woman in the grungy office eyed his cane as she handed him the key. Cockroach heaven in the bathroom, a musty smell of old loves and hates that lingered over the worn bed. He would take his Ramada wedding chapel any day, but it didn't matter. She was there. After years of a brilliant career in medicine, being known and respected if not liked, after Stacy, after everything, he finally had a life. On the run, a fugitive, but he had never felt so bound up in life. Together wholly with someone. She had given him that.

"Canada returns a lot," he said. They sat on the bed. She was letting him loosen her braid while she unbuttoned her shirt.

"I know." The Canadians justified their extraditions on anti-terrorism, he had understood. They had no laws against Christianity itself; those who acclaimed themselves Christians were not encapsulated from society in camps or forced to take anti-theics. Only involvement with the underground would trigger the Canadian authorities' righteous wrath and send them poking through moose herds looking for fugitives wanted by their big brother to the south. And that's what they would be sought as. "There are a lot more sympathizers among the general public," Ailyn went on. "But we'll still have to hide." She glanced at him. "Change our names."

A euphemism for _Forget your career_. He kissed the curve of her neck and laid his cheek against the hollow of it, trapping the heat between them. His erection had reached the painful stage. He was cold inside, thinking of the lake. Then their clothes were off and her warmth enveloped him; he was dizzy with the throb of his blood, her hands on his skin where they created a pattern in his head made of fire. Sounds from outside ceased. There at the edge of the forest where their country fell off the map their own sounds became the world - breaths syncopated, murmurs of hearts heard more through fingertips than eardrums. Her moans were his name, "Greg" and then later, "Greg". This was the secret. He had pushed at it all his life, wanting in, wanting what others had and which he suspected now they had never known, not like this, because it was too much for a brain. You let your brain go, was the secret. You said, I do, and you were in that two-person inner circle, so large inside her he thought his cock would burst, large inside himself with heat, and cold with the fear that someone was coming to tell them they couldn't do this anymore. This thing he needed so much. He saw her eyes, blue-green arctic ice all melted and he was swimming behind them. He took her breast in his mouth and reached that place suddenly where his body erupted, thrusting, his cry as loud as a gunshot, that second of being everywhere and nowhere, joy pumping through him and out. Too much for a brain.

They lay in their warm fluid and talked. She told him she was frightened they would harass her father in Kearney after she vanished, believing he would know something about her plans because she had visited him, and he held her close, because they were powerless to do anything about it. Bright sunlight oozed its way in through the chinks in the curtain and sleep came hard.

He was in the hospital elevator but it was going up, not down. He would never find the bomb now. He stabbed in vain at the buttons and the doors opened onto Blenheim's bedroom. The terrorist had the phone in his hand and was lifting his gun, they would be dead in seconds, but there was something he could say to stop him. A name. Blenheim, fucked mind or not, had been in love with someone in his twisted way, he had understood that from nothing more than a photo, and saying that person's name would off-balance him enough to gain them seconds, but he couldn't remember it. _Someone help us_, was his last thought before Ailyn's body beside him exploded, the bullets ripping through her chest and then her throat, almost taking her head off.

He woke into the peace of the motel room. She was sitting beside him, already dressed. Dusk slanted in at a low angle. He had slept for hours.

"It's getting dark," she told him.

"Evening does that."

She smiled, a look so vulnerable (_in love_, he relished saying to himself) that she seemed to glow in the faded light. He had a notion she wanted to say things to him, reaching out a hand to stroke his chest, but they would have years to say all the things they wanted, better times when he wasn't still fighting the horror of seeing her head blown off in a dream, and so he stood and pulled on his pants to deflect more talk.

"So it's cloak and dagger time," he said. "I've got the dagger. You got the -?"

A knock sounded on the door.

The reaction was visceral. She gasped, spinning to stare at the door. His heart beat a wild staccato. "It's the owner," he told her, "or someone with the wrong room."

The knock came again. "Police! Open up!"

The door burst open, not waiting for an answer. Men, black-uniformed, bled into the room, a spreading stain. A rifle snout was in his face. He was shouting, puffs of pure terror, "Yes, no! No!" drowned in the brisk shouts of the cops, forced back on the bed. He couldn't see Ailyn. Her cries mirrored his. The stain was fanning out in its search, lifting blankets and thumping into the bathroom. When he dared turn his head he could see her. She had been shoved against a wall brutally and her hands cuffed behind her back. A uniform, indistinguishable from the rest, yelled "Out!" and the men flanking Ailyn propelled her past his line of sight toward the door. Her expression made him nauseous. He had seen it before, on patients told they were dying, knee-buckling despair, a fear that sapped every thought. He wanted to scream but it would have come out as puke. "You too," his own handler growled. "Up." Showing him how with the rifle.

A whoop stopped them. The men at the door turned. One of the searchers had opened the top drawer of the nightstand and was lifting an object out of it, twisting as he did, so that his body no longer blocked their view. A black book, the kind everyone knew from the warning documentaries. The finder's eyes were wide with glee. It was a bible.

For a second or more it seemed natural to him, as if bibles were an integral part of motel rooms, some corollary that belonged to another world, then his mind flipped back to reality. "You planted that!" he howled. He stood, ignoring the rifle his shoulder knocked aside. Cops converged toward his outburst, moving back in from the door, ready to subdue him. "That wasn't there before! You -!"

A shriller cry of alarm sounded outside. The bodies were moving back out again, a stampede of black-clothed animals jostling him out with them, and he realized what their shouts were saying.

Ailyn had run.

All eyes had been on the bible. Her watchers had stepped back into the room for a look, leaving her alone. She had seen the moment and let panic rule.

There was nowhere to run. He could see her past the men now. A clump of pine stood at the end of the drive. She broke for it, then swerved. They were faster. He yelled No!" but it was only a rasp in his throat, a paralyzed dream cry, then he punched through the knot of men left guarding him and was running after the runners, novas of pain drawing shrieks from him every time his right foot came down. They cut her off and she fell on her stomach. Rifles bristled around her head. The air rang with animal shouts. He could see her face when she twisted it, bloodied from the sharp gravel of the drive, wild-eyed with terror, then he was there and down, on all fours, forming a tent over her while he bellowed, "_Don't shoot! Don't shoot!_" He felt the barrel of a gun brush the back of his head. Someone was ordering him to move. He brought his mouth to her ear and whispered, "Don't run, don't try anything, _do everything they say!_" Obey authority. He didn't know if she could hear him through her moans. "_You have to come back to me alive_." He thought of how they would make her strip when they searched her, her shame when the mastectomy was revealed, and then he was crying.

****


	18. A Carnival of Idiots

_(A/N: This is getting close to the end. Only one more chapter after this plus an epilogue.)_

**18. A Carnival of Idiots**

House was on TV.

Lisa Cuddy leaned toward the screen in the deserted pediatrics lounge, feeling the weight on her heart shift as she did, that anvil that had crushed her breath for a month. Greg House looked like death, not even warmed over, just left to congeal until he was only barely recognizable as himself. The cameras in front of the courthouse fought for footage of the collaborator, wobbling amid reporters' hurled questions, and his face turning toward them came into focus. It was as though his features had been taken apart and put back together by someone who didn't know him.

"They broke him." Foreman had come in behind her.

"Don't be ridiculous." The weight shifted again, a leaden lump climbing toward her throat.

"A month in jail. And why let him go now? It's because he's cut a deal. He's going to testify against McCullough."

"Just shut up." Clever riposte, un-Houseworthy. Her mind had curled up at the edges in the month since House's arrest with Ailyn McCullough, unable to focus, as wobbly as the cameras following him into the courthouse lobby now. Foreman seemed unaffected, unless the tenuous way he closed the lounge door and joined her on the sofa meant anything, but then he had never drawn strength from his employer; he had no notion of how strength could be extracted from that grizzled figure, the out-of-control antics not a weakness but an asset, integrity at the cost of looking like a fool, showing her what was important to rebel against and what wasn't. Broken was the bad word. She didn't want to hear it.

"News last night said they're dropping all charges of Christianity," Foreman continued. "No evidence against him personally. Just got suckered in by the wrong woman." He snorted. "Bet they did a job on McCullough though. Wonder what she looks like now."

A camera had shoved its way close to House. He had shaved, probably forced to by the prosecuting attorney whose star witness he would be, revealing gray-tinged skin over gaunt cheeks. Above that, two grayer-blue haunted patches that were his eyes stared at the camera for a moment. He wore a tie, piss-yellow. She watched his hand come up, the fuck-off gesture of every celebrity who had ever pushed a camera out of his face, but instead of blocking the view, she realized, he held a marker in his hand. It read _Non-erasable_. As casually as though noting symptoms on his whiteboard, he leaned in and drew a thick black cross on the lens before the cameraman had time to lurch back. "Hey - that's property damage!" the cameraman's voice sounded. As the view fell back House struck a pose, arms outstretched, that lined him up as if by chance with the Christian symbol now superimposed on the screen, the perfect image of the what's-his-name they worshipped, hanging there half a second, only long enough to make a statement, _crucify me_, before he dropped his arms again. Yowls rose from the crowd, shocked laughter. A grin played around House's eyes, never reaching his lips that remained a dead line across his face, amusement just an intellectual rimshot that could no longer touch the numb center of him, then he turned away to enter the courtroom and a guard slammed the door on the news cameras.

"Not broken," she said to Foreman, who grimaced. Subdued, perhaps, but not broken. It should have sounded more triumphant.

****

Push through the unreal, the faces with their hot eager stares, all longing for a glimpse of the collaborator, the duped doctor taken in by femme fatale. They were papier-mache, surfaces that he knew would crumble at his touch. Doors closed on the cameras, but more swiveled to him inside the courtroom, the officially allowed media set up and ready to roll. Faces turned, those who had claimed seats inside, a sea of faces, the earnest wood-paneled room growing quiet for one second at the sight of him and then louder again. He met the prosecuting attorney in the middle of the aisle and the man wrenched the marker from his hand with a look of disgust and waved him into the row behind his own front-row seat on the prosecuting side. The side that sought to send Aimee Lynn Nealy to prison for terrorism. Rex Moorehead moved over on the bench for him. The prosecutor's assistant Moorehead had done his brown-nosing best to befriend him during their coaching sessions on his upcoming testimony. Moorehead was a smarmy golden-haired good old boy who wore a different Piaget watch every day and had so obviously been instructed to befriend their witness in order to draw out more information from him that House had no pangs of conscience in only pretending to return the friendship. Just showed how little they knew him. Moorehead turned.

"Damnatio ad bestias," House muttered, glancing at the crowd.

Moorehead chuckled, a slimy sound. "Except we're not in ancient Rome. And they're not animals about to tear you apart in a coliseum, Greg. You've already hit on the more fitting metaphor for the day - crucifixion."

He shrugged. He wasn't going to discuss his antics before the camera. Rex Moorehead had pried well and truly in the week leading up to the trial, with a subtlety he could appreciate, but he was immune to priers and had been all his life. They would have to live with the fact that they couldn't be sure of their star witness, regardless of how much they coached him. Only the day before Moorehead had asked him, casually, as though it had just occurred to him, whether he had ever met John Galt. He had replied, _Ah, if I told you that I'd have to kill you, or at least put you in an artificial coma_. The thought that they were out for bigger Christian fish than either him or Ailyn chilled him now as he twisted in his seat, miming a glance back at the crowd. Wilson and his brother sat in the back row, their faces deadly earnest. He had seen them when he came in. _There's your John Galt_, he could have stood up and shouted.

The crowd quieted as the judge entered and took his seat, and then Ailyn was being led in, and he felt as though he were dying. Her hair was short. She had lost weight. These were facts, registered superficially, but they did not convey the horror of Ailyn McCullough's blank face as she was set behind a glass panel on the defense side, separated from the crowd as though she were a komodo dragon that might attack them. Catatonia, he filed and rejected, as he fought the rising nausea, or locked-in syndrome. Her eyes picked him out instantly, incredibly fast given the large crowd, but then her gaze moved on, as though he were nothing more than lover wallpaper, inanimate. Every wave of pain his leg had ever broadcast seemed to have taken root in his cells, his body imploding at that glance away, and he groaned. Rex Moorehead frowned at him. During their sessions the assistant had speculated to him that the defense would plead diminished capacity for Ailyn's shooting of Blenheim, and he had snorted at the term, as though any capacity of hers could ever be diminished. "You all right?" Moorehead muttered now. _No, how could I be? You people have…diminished my wife's capacity_.

Neither Moorehead nor anyone else on the prosecuting team had asked him what had been done to him in jail. They were part of the system and he was on their side now, expected to forgive and forget, as opposed to remember and hate. All part of the deal, tell us some lies, get out of jail free. The set-up had weighed on his mind like tons of dirt, burying him alive. The dirty, dirty system you couldn't claw your way out of without suffocating on. Perhaps Ailyn's blankness was her way of retreating, hiding in the deepest part of herself until it was over, curled up into a ball. (No, that was him, his month spent curled in a ball in the corner, his cell floor smelling of piss, he knew about going away, curling up and dying a while until the next time they came for you. With an effort he pushed the memory down). If she had chosen to go away, if it was her own doing and not a sign that they had broken her, then it was possible she would return again, a kind of selective locked-in syndrome. He dared another glance at her scary stillness behind the glass. _Be in there_, he commanded.

"- and with the honest but _unreasonable_ belief that she had to defend herself and others." The defense attorney, a pink balding man who looked shell-shocked at having been court-appointed to defend a terrorist, was finishing his opening statement. The clutch of jurors watched him with all the emotion of Easter Island statues.

Moorehead leaned toward him. "Not diminished capacity after all," he whispered. "They're going to say that when she shot Blenheim it was imperfect self-defense."

"Looked perfect to me. The guy was dead."

The prosecutor turned around to scowl them down and Moorehead's whisper grew quieter. "Means she wasn't crazy but what she thought about Blenheim was. She admits to the shooting. All we have to prove is that she was acting as a Christian conspirator." Moorehead's sidelong glance at him unnerved him. "That's where your testimony comes in, Greg." No, they weren't sure of him.

Dizzy, in the sea of faces. He couldn't look at her and so he played piano on his lap, Albert Flasher boogying moonbeams, while a parade of faces passed up front giving testimony. A face looked familiar, drawing his glance, and for a moment he felt sick. It was the cop who had performed the hat-and-rabbit trick with the bible in the motel room. The man told of opening the drawer, his shock at seeing proof of what they had come to arrest the culprits for, and his nausea grew. Remember and hate.

"That was planted," he said loudly.

Cameras swiveled. Moorehead and the prosecutor froze. The judge, who looked like an elongated version of Joe Pesci, leaned into his microphone and warned him against opening his mouth again like that. He dropped his head back to his lap but the damage was done. He could no longer ignore the witnesses. He sat back and watched.

Another familiar face. Nauseating in a different way. "What's Brylcreem doing here?" he muttered. His neighbor Mr. Sneider, he of the slicked-back hair and scowls, with exaggerated sanctity took the stand and told a tale of being accosted by Dr. House's girlfriend in the hall who had tried, subtly, to convert him to Christianity. "That's insane," House whispered to Moorehead. "It's a downright lie." The prosecutor's assistant had stopped glancing over at him, silent in the growing awareness that their star witness had never really been on their side. "Did you guys dig him up?" No reply. "Did you pay him in pomade to come up with this crap?"

Dr. Davies had changed clothes for her testimony. Gone were the drab trousers and gray-stained doctor's coat that had matched the gray air of her medical facility at the Kearney prison. She looked professional. She told about Ailyn's visit to Mike Nealy before anyone knew she was the man's daughter, the woman's agitation at seeing her terrorist father, their heads together. At the prompting questions of the prosecutor Davies used the word _conspiring_. Why don't you tell them something that matters? House wanted to scream. The fact that the prisoners you give Norxylam to develop signs of clozapine mistreatment? He willed Davies to look at him but she wouldn't. _You're a doctor, dammit, get honest. Did they get to you too?_ The twist of the prison doctor's head away from him as she left the stand spoke shame.

Robert Chase could at least look him in the eye. The ex-cop did so several times, as he told how his former partner Ailyn McCullough had come to him and asked him to watch Blenheim, with a convoluted story that she believed her boss to be a certain Darren Blackwell who had been involved in Dirty May. He told of her call, on the night of the hospital evacuation, telling him there was a bomb, that _someone_ had tipped her off about it. Did he think that she had contact to the Christian underground, the prosecutor wanted to know. The witness had no idea. Was he aware that there was no evidence of a Darren Blackwell who had been involved in Dirty May and even less evidence that Charles Blenheim might have been that person? Chase fiddled with one finger of his left hand, as though twisting a ring that wasn't there.

"I think she was doing her job," Chase finally said. "She had become obsessed with tracking down the Dirty May perps, maybe more to exonerate her father than anything else, but then we should all be obsessed with finding them, shouldn't we? I think she just got confused."

The prosecutor looked distressed, the witness obviously not adhering to the script they had practiced. _Just wait_, House thought.

The next witness was a giant penis of a man, fresh-faced, with large hands that gripped the rail in front of him. Ailyn's eyes went to him and darted away again. The man had worked undercover for Blenheim, and the room became a vacuum of silence as he testified to meeting Ailyn in a bar, pretending to be the replacement for the Christian underground member named Rick she was secretly meeting. _She was working both sides_, the penis said. It was the first testimony that did not sound like hearsay. Proof that she had had contact, and perhaps had given material support, to terrorists. All around, looks of grim satisfaction coalesced in House's peripheral vision, dark blots tugging at the corners of his eyes.

"Dr. Gregory House."

He left his cane behind at the gesture of the guard, swore on the copy of the Constitution to tell the truth, and then he was in the stand. On the false assumption that they were best buddies, the prosecutor had appointed Moorehead to question him. The assistant had an odd gleam in his eye, sick fear over a front of intimacy. "Dr. House, tell us in your own words what you know about the woman who called herself Ailyn McCullough."

He let a second tick by. "Did you know we have erectile tissue in our nose?" Moorehead gawped. A woman's whoop-giggle rose from the crowd and was shushed. "And that there are scent receptors in the prostate?"

The judge leaned. "Dr. House, does this have something to do with the question asked?"

"Nothing at all, Your Honor. I mention these skeevy matters only to make sure you're all paying attention."

Silly, because they were all paying attention. Add up viewers at home and he had never had so much attention directed at him. The irony of it struck him. More attention focused on him than he could ever have wished for, a magnifying glass that just might burn him up, and for once instead of his usual lies he was going to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

"We're torturers," he declared. "We're tyrants. That thing there –" he indicated the Constitution he had sworn on - "has come to mean so little you might as well use it as shitpaper."

"Dr. House –"

"Ailyn McCullough." He stopped and started over. "Aimee Nealy –"

He started at the beginning and he told the story. A woman had come into his office. She had asked him to talk to Michael Nealy. She had made him strip once and then never searched him. During his four-day arrest she had kept the dogs off him, by some means he would never understand, and they had become lovers (a false word, not large enough, not intimate enough). When she had finally told him about her father, the terrible bind of who she was, she had cried. (Only here did Moorehead, the good-old-boy smile stunned off his face, try to interrupt him, the judge reminding him tersely that if he called a witness he couldn't pick and choose what that witness said). As he spoke he wove Ailyn's story into his – the little girl who loved her daddy, who knew him to be wrongly condemned. Whose mother killed herself. The quiet in the courtroom was a living animal that rustled and whispered. Then they were in Blenheim's apartment, perusing a photo that showed the CA agent with Nealy, and blueprints they would only later realize were Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital. An informant named Kyle Henderson wafted into their apartment, they found a bomb, Blenheim turned in his bedroom, he held a gun and he would blow her head off any second -

He started, shocked out of his telling, but it was only the image from his nightmare. It choked off the story, which was over anyway. Around him, the faces had changed. The jurors, if they were statues, had toppled in all directions, the front row leaning their elbows now on the rail the better to concentrate on him, while others canted at various angles, intent on listening. An Asian woman twisted to stare at Ailyn behind the glass. He was acutely aware of not having told the whole truth after all, the pressure inside him like a lumbar puncture, but then maybe there was no such thing as whole truth. He had left out passing a message to Cameron, helping her escape. Meeting John Galt (a biggie, that one). Marriage. Dancing nude to Freddy Mercury. These were truths as well, inaccessible to words. Truth was a crock anyway, a hallucinogenic, showing everyone who tripped out on it something different.

Except the one truth he had yet to reveal.

Moorehead in front of him had gone on a bad trip. The testimony – the truth - was so different from the tale they had rehearsed – that concocted story involving Ailyn's links to the most violent terrorist fringe – that the assistant attorney took a full ten seconds to recover. His mouth opened and closed. House leaned toward the microphone as though to peer into his skull. "The wheel's turning, but the hamster's dead."

"You – I –"

"Does your brain get unemployment compensation when it goes away like that?"

"Dr. House."

"If you can't think of anything else to say, might as well suture you up, because you're done."

The attorney latched on to what he could, and it was salient. "You _admit_ that your lover Ailyn McCullough worked for the Christians. For the radical fringe."

He shrugged, though the atrial flutter in his chest was not a good sign. "The Radical Fringe? Is that where you get your hair cut?"

"That she sabotaged Christian Affairs arrests? That she may have even worked with John Galt?"

"She never said that." Tunnel vision picked out Wilson and Galt in their place in the back row, two innocuous faces among fifty, their sibling similarity apparent even at a distance. The moxie it took for Galt to be there he didn't want to think about. He willed his eyes to stay on Moorehead.

"Isn't it true, Dr. House, that Ailyn McCullough converted you, that you eventually began working with her, for the Christians?" The attorney had found his strategy. If the witness wouldn't cooperate, tear him down. The gleam in his eyes now was malice. "You visited Nealy in prison several times. You were running messages, weren't you?"

He shook his head. "I _was_ the message."

A frown. "You'll have to explain that, Dr. House."

"There was something I was supposed to say. The reason the Christians worked it so that I would meet Nealy. Something I was supposed to discover for myself and understand." Somehow he knew Wilson's eyes had closed and opened again. He pulled a sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket. "I'd like to submit this as evidence, Your Honor." The judge did not reach for the papers. "It proves that the Norxylam we give to patients to treat their theic syndrome is just clozapine, a drug for schizophrenics."

"You can't do that!" Moorehead exclaimed. "_We_ submit the evidence –"

"That it's killing them." Murmurs rose. "Causing side effects they don't even need to be exposed to, many of which are fatal." A cameraman had pulled back from his camera to stare. "These papers prove it."

Knee-jerk panic made Moorehead take a step back and say, "Your Honor, I have no more questions. We're finished with the witness." As though it would shut him up. Moorehead realized his mistake, as the little defense attorney shot out of his seat and thundered toward the stand almost before the judge could say, "Your witness."

"Dr. House." The defense attorney seemed to have woken from his vegetative state. His bald head shone with sweat. A mania had apparently gripped him at the mention of Norxylam, the brunt of what this respected doctor had to say like a shot of adrenaline, and looking about the courtroom House could see it in others, sores erupting here and there, as those spectators for whom Norxylam was more than just a word began to comprehend. The defense attorney took a breath, intent. "Tell us everything you know about Norxylam."

_What relative of yours is in the camps_, he wondered.

"Objection! Your Honor, Dr. House is not on the stand as a doctor." The prosecutor's voice was a wail.

"And yet he is one. Continue."

_Couldn't have said it better myself._

As concisely as he could he detailed his path of discovery: Nealy's hints, his research, the numbers on the papers (lying useless on his lap, unacceptable to the system for now). The risks of clozapine, the agranulocytosis shutting down the white blood cells until any old infection could take hold and chew up the organs. Myocarditis, the heart giving out, like a gesture of despair, old before its time.

"There's no telling how many deaths in the camps or prisons are attributable to non-monitored clozapine. I found out the death rate from suicide is higher in these places than in regular prisons, and I assume a lot of heart failures have been made to look like suicides – "

"Speculation!" The prosecutor looked close to heart failure himself. "It's not a medication that's on trial here, Your Honor. This is irrelevant –"

"Shut up." As calm as the judge's voice was, the command was hardly court procedure. Even the court stenographer stopped punching her keys to look up at him.

"Couldn't have said it better myself, Your Honor." House turned back to the room. "I'm not saying doctors are in on this. They're the patsies. They're being lied to themselves. But anyone administering Norxylam a lot would have seen these signs on a daily basis -"

"Again, speculation! Hearsay –"

"Rabbit syndrome." The voice came from the back. Dr. Davies stood, almost trembling, nodding her head. The judge frowned but did not order her silenced. Her voice wavered. "I've seen it. I've seen Rabbit syndrome in about half of the patients I give Norxylam to at Kearney." She looked him straight in the eye as she spoke.

"And there you go." He watched Davies sit back down, a sheen of relief – and pride – in the tilt of her head. "Rabbit syndrome - no, not when you grow long ears and a cotton-tail – is an involuntary chewing motion and it's caused by antipsychotics like clozapine."

"Do you mean to say, Dr. House –" The defense attorney had swollen with anticipation, a sweating slick-headed balloon about to burst – "that there is _no such thing_ as the theic anomaly in the brain?" The guy knew how to get to the point. He was starting to like him.

He leaned in to the microphone. "There is no such thing as the theic anomaly in the brain."

The cries were so immediate he thought a fight had broken out. There were believers and unbelievers, and they were both vocal. The judge was still gazing at him, too caught up to gavel the room to order. Through the noise the defense attorney said to him, "You're a doctor." Too quiet for the stenographer to hear, who had stopped typing anyway. It was a question, hesitant, almost thrilled. "You're a well-known doctor."

"After the Thirties." His voice hushed them. "After Christians were made the boogeyman for world chaos and the Depression, said to be secretly pulling the strings to bring governments down, we had to find some reason for this belief that it looked like parents passed on to their children. It had to be congenital. In the fifties it was suddenly called 'sluggishly progressing schizophrenia' and it presented – oddly enough – in anyone who expressed a political opinion the government didn't like. Believe me, I'm not making this up, you can google it. By the Seventies we had found the source. A misalignment only the best brain-scan experts could see."

"But you don't see it."

"I used to think I did. No, let me rephrase that – I was wrong." It had never been easier to say.

"How can everyone see something that's not there?"

"The power of suggestion. Look, I believe we invented an anomaly, that certain people pointed at inconclusive brain scans and everyone else said, Yes I see it too, because we've created a society where no one dares to say the emperor's butt-naked. I believe a drug was invented to treat this invented anomaly and that Saunders-Glesco repackaged clozapine and stamped a big N on it for Not-politically-correct, and that we've been punishing dissidents by giving them a schizophrenia drug when they don't need an antipsychotic at all. Call it 'punitive psychiatry'. And our cachectic moral sense has kept everyone – even the doctors – from asking the right questions." He paused and the room held its breath. "Either there's no anomaly or we all have it."

More uproar. The prosecutor had leaped to his feet, outshouting the other shouters. "So all these people who believe in god - you think they're _right_?" The judge didn't call him to order; they had left court procedure in the toilet. It had morphed into a round-table slugfest. Others in the room were standing. "Do _you_ believe in a god, Dr. House?"

He was shaking his head. "It all goes back to those scent receptors in the prostate. Turns out that when they smell violet, which is the scent prostate cancer cells put out, they trigger a command to stop cell division. Natural cancer-fighting. So intricate you figure something intelligent had to create it, when all it is, is millions of years of evolution, rewriting the program, getting things right a lot and sometimes getting it very wrong. If a god created us, then he created Lesch-Nyhan too. Lesch-Nyhan happens to be a gene mutation that causes self-mutilating urges. I'm not talking depression, I'm talking pure destructive physical tics. Leave your Lesch-Nyhan kid unstrapped from his wheelchair for one second and he'll eat his own fingers to the knuckle or bang his head against a wall until he's in a coma. And then there are the butterfly kids. Epidermolysis bullosa. Their skin just falls off after a while –" He stopped. He was ranting. "No. Get this down." That to the open-mouthed stenographer, whose hands flew to the keys. "I could never believe in a god that created Lesch-Nyhan. But – and this is the point – _other people should be allowed to believe in it-him-her if that's what they need_." The urge to look at Ailyn was overpowering, and he fought it down.

"You'd like to see the government overthrown, is that it?!" The prosecutor's voice was that of a hysterical woman. "You want the rule of religion –"

"I want the government to _grow up_ a little! Stop being scared – sure, religion's a rival, it will compete for people's allegiance, maybe even prevent them from doing something the state orders them to do – killing the enemy in a war for instance. But if we hadn't pushed religion underground, we might have found a way by now for the government and religion to go about their business without getting up in each other's grill, some kind of – I don't know - _separation_ of state and religion. Without resorting to tyranny or torture."

"We don't torture!" A cacophony of roars filled the room, pro and con.

"Of course you do!" He breathed hard to project his shout over the others. "You're holding a gun to her head right now –" he indicated Ailyn without looking at her – "just because of who her father was, because she might have loved him and might have absorbed some of the things he believed. The reason we're here today is to choose whether we want to be the tyrant or not, whether we'll condemn a woman on the letter of the law or understand what was really happening – " (The judge had found his gavel and was pounding to no avail, bellowing, the guards twisting to obey orders they couldn't hear). "This is the case that pushes this country to the limit!" He thought of Ailyn with a gun pointed at his chest, how he had pushed her, as he had pushed patients so often, knowing she would never do it. "This is where you decide whether to pull the trigger, whether to be a country that tortures –"

The prosecutor was pounding on his table, the rhythmic slaps lifting his words above the others: "No no _no_! Not real torture!"

_Time for the whole truth._ "Oh yeah, well what about this?!"

He stood up in the stand and unbuttoned his shirt. A guard rushed at him, confused, then stopped at the sight of his chest.

The burn marks were large. Elongated patches of black necrotic tissue had begun to slough off, crumbling at his touch like well-charred wood. He touched himself now. Crisscrossed sections where hair and skin would never recover. He had foregone bandages deliberately for the morning and the most recent eschars, barely healed, had begun to ooze again, wetting the edges of his shirt. In the crazed silence a camera whirred. The pain had become a part of his head in the last few weeks, an addendum to his leg, embraced and almost forgotten, but when he gazed out he could see them tallying up in shock how much it must hurt. He looked, finally, at Ailyn.

She was gazing at him with love. She was all there. Her look was a nod without nodding, acknowledging that she knew he had never for a second thought to testify against her, that whatever she had gone through and would still go through she would be able to survive, because he would be there inside it with her. Because he had endured the same things. It was all the affirmation he needed.

He turned back to the defense attorney, the prosecutor, the judge, all the rows of faces wiped blank with horror. "No more questions?"

***

The jury was out. In the restroom, alone, he stood at the sink to open his shirt again and dab at the black wounds, and when he looked up a memory snared him, a different mirror, the restroom at the hospital, how the face that had stared out over a year ago had hated itself. That had been the moment before she walked into his office. The face that gazed out at him now, in comparison, was a stranger's. It had aged, and yet only laterally, in the sense of maturing. It held hope. Insane to hope because you could never beat the system. But she had given him that. It wasn't going away again.

Someone had come in and he became aware that the figure was checking all the stalls to make sure they were empty. When he turned, John Galt stood beside him. For a moment they studied each other's reflection.

"Things will change now."

He tried to snort his disbelief, a tiny sound. His performance in the courtroom had siphoned every drop of energy from him.

"Not right away," Galt continued. "It may be gradual, hardly noticeable at first, but you've started the ball rolling."

"The snowball effect."

"We can only hope." Galt seemed to struggle with an impulse for a moment. "You know, Jimmy cares a lot about you –"

"Oh _please_, not now –"

"He thought Christianity was right for you. It was right for him. He had seen so much death –"

"Oh, I haven't?"

"Long lingering death, and he saw the peace and courage religion could bring people. And he had seen what it did for me. He only thought he could help you."

"He thought he could cure me. I was his patient."

"You were – are – his friend. He just should have known you better. I haven't known you very long, but even I can see you're your own person too much to ever accept anything like that. You'll always be on some crusade but it will be your own personal one. Your own cures. Trying to cure humanity of – who knows what."

He thought of what he had done in the courtroom. "I guess I think I can cure humanity of its stupidity. And how stupid is that?"

"It's stupid – and very brave."

In the mirror he studied the face he had met only twice and which seemed so familiar. "I still hate you."

"I'm sorry about that. There shouldn't be more hate in the world. The point of Christianity is to reduce the hate. If I could, I'd reach inside you and excise it. You'd call it debridement. But you wouldn't let anyone do that, would you?"

"Not unless I was in a coma."

Galt suddenly leaned in close to him. "Listen carefully." The intensity woke him from his dreamlike fatigue. "Certain things will be said and reported. _Do not believe them_. The government lies, the media lies. Everyone lies. That's the one thing you have to keep in your head." _Oh believe me, I do_. "Whatever happens from now on, Dr. House, _appearances will be deceptive_." Galt's hand was on his arm now, hard. He felt dams breaking inside him, more than hope flooding through him, reality washing away. "And you may have to do some deceiving of your own. Are you a good actor?"

He could hardly find his voice. "I'm a very good actor."

A bump landed on the restroom door, someone about to enter, and before the man was through the door Galt had turned away and was washing his hands. They didn't know each other.

House returned to the courtroom, where the jury found Aimee Lynn Nealy guilty of manslaughter and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, and the judge, noting the mental state of theic disease which had impacted on her actions, sentenced her to an anti-theic regimen and ten years of encapsulation in the Nevada Theist Rehabilitation Camp.

****


	19. All Is Loneliness

(A/N: Getting close to the end of this – hard to believe it's been over a year. Only a long epilogue left, so please watch for it in about two weeks. Thanks to everyone for reading!)

**19. All is Loneliness**

"He would have waited for her! He _could_ have waited – no, no, you haven't seen them together, you don't know how they are…how they _were_ together." Wilson grasped the steering wheel with a force that threatened to wrench it off and hung a left against the red light. Cars squealed and honked. "That stubbornness of his - he would have been waiting for her when she got out, even if it meant the rest of his life, but this –" Wilson's eyes were bruised with dread, red-rimmed, and she felt her own panic rise like a chokehold. "This is the end. It will kill him."

Lisa Cuddy was there by accident. Watching Wilson sprint through the lobby toward the door had rung her alarm bells. Keeping an eye on the oncologist was a way of keeping an eye on House, home on leave after the trial, and she had bolted after Wilson and flung herself into his car before he could protest. As he drove she listened to him gasp out the news a nurse had just told him was on TV. She punched at the radio and then braced herself against another breakneck turn. She feared for her life. She feared for House's life.

_Authorities are saying that the transport_

"Does he have a gun in the house?"

Wilson's reply was to ram on the brake because they were there, 221B, practically flying out of the car. Media wolves had started to gather. A man in a suit, CA at a glance, tried to stop them, but they had the advantage of momentum. More suits had bunched around House's door at the top of the stairs and it finally brought them to a halt. One of the CA agents was slapping the door with his palm, saying something about _just some questions_. Others turned to glare at the newcomers. Behind them the door flew open.

"Oh god," Wilson muttered.

"_Here to gloat?!_" Not a question or statement, more an animal howl, with none of the emphasis of human speech. House's roar knocked her back, one high heel going off the top stair. She clutched the rail to keep from falling.

The CA agents streamed past House into the apartment unasked, forcing him back, and at first she couldn't see him. When she did she realized it was because he stood bent forward. Grown short, as if a wire had been taken out of him. His shirt front looked wet and as she followed Wilson and the CA men into the apartment the smell of booze hit her. In a corner the TV was on, showing wobbly news images of a highway flanked by woods.

_Forcing the transport to halt on the road at which point the terrorists_

His eyes. When House finally looked at his visitors she reeled again. It was like looking into a fire-charred building. She understood why Wilson had said _Oh god_. There was nothing left of the man, only a shell consumed from the inside by rage.

"You must be _thriiilled_!" It was another howl, directed at the agents. It hurt her throat to hear it. Wilson had hurried to House and was squeezing his shoulders, whispering, his face close. He looked taller than his friend. "You must be _haappy_, you got what you wanted all along!"

"What we want is to ask you some questions, Dr. House." The lead agent looked unsure of himself.

The TV had switched to an image of sheet-covered bodies stretched out along the grassy verge of the highway, filmed from a distance. A van stood sideways in the middle of the road. Police officers were busy cordoning off the area.

"We want to ask you some questions regarding Aimee Nealy's death."

Ailyn McCullough was dead. Wilson's chopped-off words as they were driving over had turned her stomach. The drivers of the van that had been moving the condemned terrorist to a more secure prison before her camp internment had been forced to stop on a lonely road when they found it blocked by a Camry that had had a close encounter with a twelve-point buck. The deer's body still lay twitching by the road, the car's hood and windshield were crushed. All a trick. The Christian militants in the car, joined quickly by others from the woods, had stormed the van and managed to get the back doors opened before they were overpowered and killed. McCullough had been shot trying to flee even after all her rescuers were dead.

"Your involvement with the Nealy family, with Christians, Dr. House, means you may have had a hand in planning Aimee Nealy's escape attempt." The boss agent had decoupled Wilson from House and planted himself in front of the suspect. "We can obtain a search warrant, but if you'll consent to us searching the apartment now it would be a sign of cooperation –"

"She's _dead, dammit_! _What do you care?_" Twisting away, House rammed the desk. A lamp fell over. He was drunker than he looked. High, she realized. As he bent almost double, the image of a man fighting pain that was everywhere and nowhere at once, a bottle of pills slipped from his shirt pocket and rolled onto the floor. They all stood for seconds gazing at it, the only sound in the silence the TV.

"I want the body," House finally told the floor.

"How many?" rasped Wilson. He had snatched the bottle up.

"The body won't be released, Dr. House. It won't be shown to the public nor will any photos of it be leaked. Do you think we'll let you people make a martyr of her?"

"Think she'll embarrass you by rising from the dead? _I want her body, dammit!_"

"How _many_?" Wilson repeated. The bottle he shook hardly rattled.

"There was too much public criticism of her sentencing," the agent went on. "She became popular during the trial. Half the country believes her story about Blenheim was true. Not to mention your cockeyed crap about Norxylam. And your stunt with the shirt… Just because some underling got out of hand with you. No, images of a dead Aimee Nealy would only fan the protest."

An odd reason not to flaunt pictures of one's conquered enemy. Man was an ape; it liked reprisal. Trophies. In the background Lisa Cuddy could see the shot of highway on the TV again, cameras being restrained at a hundred-foot radius, the bodies that were only lumps under the sheets.

She looked back at House and saw with a start what Wilson was already staring at. "He's blue," she whispered.

The exhausted gray tinge of House's face had become oxygen-starved cyan around the lips.

He was breathing hard, stridor; the next second he was on the floor as his knees gave out.

"He's ODed!" Wilson shouted uselessly. The CA agent stared down at the figure at his feet as though it were something distasteful he had just avoided stepping in on the street. "Out of the way," Cuddy yelled at him. While she flipped her phone open to call 911 she managed to roll House on his side and realized Wilson wasn't helping her. The oncologist had run to the hall closet instead. When he opened it an ankle-deep avalanche of sneakers poured out.

"What the hell are you _doing_?" she cried.

From the top shelf Wilson yanked an ancient-looking Puma sports bag and flung himself back down beside House.

"What's wrong with him?" The agent's voice floated somewhere above them.

"Booze and pills." She wasn't about to take the time to explain the respiration-depressing effects of Vicodin combined with well-aged Baker's bourbon, not the least because she was agape at the stomach pump Wilson had fumbled from the sports bag.

"He keeps that here?"

Wilson's movements were steady but rushed, lightning motions of fear, as he checked the pump's cuff for leaks. The thing looked old. "We both know him well enough. He knows himself. He also keeps this, and this." From the Puma he pulled a bag mask to hand-pump air into the patient. A combitube, an LMA. "I suggested an oxygen tank at one time but he thought that would be overdoing it."

In her heightened state of alertness the words seemed resonant with meaning. _That would be overdoing it_. Wilson had spoken the last words softly and urgently into the space where their heads met over House. Behind them the agents were milling. She could feel them watching. One had finally shut the TV off.

Then she was stumbling to the kitchen for warm water and a pot, and she watched Wilson pump twenty-three half-dissolved Vicodin out of a groaning, semi-conscious House, repeating the lavage again and again until the fluid in the tube ran clear.

She worked the bag mask after Wilson detracted the stomach tube, placing the mask over House's face and pumping the air into him that his own lungs were denying him. He lay still, eyes opening and closing, the feral animal that has finally understood its rescuers are there to rescue it. Every squeeze she gave the bag might have been a caress.

Wilson had collapsed to the side, leaning against a table leg. The gray tinge around his own lips said how worried he had been. "That was close," he muttered, as House's eyes went sideways to him, and again she had the sense of listening to a secret language. Wilson's relief seemed real enough. "Twenty-three Vicodin."

Half the CA agents had turned away at the sight of their suspect's stomach contents being siphoned into a cooking pot. The lead agent, still unperturbed, returned from a conference with one of his own at the front door. "He's going to the hospital," Cuddy told him.

"News bozos have turned out in full downstairs." The agent's frown was centered on House lying on the floor, with a questioning lip-bite, as though he were trying to figure out a tricky clue on a crossword puzzle.

"That's your problem," Cuddy replied. "You'll have to let them know that McCullough's boyfriend was so torn up about her death he tried to kill himself."

"Might 'fan some protest'," Wilson added.

House's hand on hers holding the mask startled her. He pushed the mask aside and for a moment they were all silent as he practiced taking breaths on his own. His eyes were on the agent.

"Search the damn place," he finally rasped. The hastily inserted tube had injured his throat. He sounded like an electric blender on low. "Start with this." With the one hand he could raise he shoved the full pot toward the agent's feet and some of the prettily colored contents splashed onto the immaculate shoes. The man blanched and cursed. "Never know where I might stash evidence."

_They would find no evidence_, an instinct told her. In the whirlwind that ensued, agents tramping through the rooms and rifling files at their boss's gesture, she helped Wilson help House to the couch. The stillness that had fallen upon the tall figure now frightened her. Rage at least had been an impulse toward action, better in its driving force than this enervated form, his head sunk as though to study the weave of the couch. As though it would never go up again. His only motion was a weak shove every time she tried to replace the oxygen mask on his face. After a minute she gave up.

"We need to get him to the hospital," she told Wilson, who had turned to peer out the window. "Those pills were half-dissolved. They'll still have an effect. We can use your car."

"We'll have to get through the circus down there."

The agent returned to loom over her where she crouched beside House. It made House look up, with an expression that was almost but not quite curiosity.

"Tell me something," he said to the agent. "I want the truth."

The man waited.

"The Christians who attacked the transport." He seemed unable to finish the question. A shudder ran through him. "They didn't have guns, did they?"

"Yes, they did."

"Look." The rage was rising again. "I swear I'd pour out my…_guts_ to you if there was anything to tell. Actually I did, it's all over your shoes. But the fact is, I had nothing to do with the-" his voice broke– "escape attempt. I just want to hear how stupid they were."

In the man's face she could see indecision, then he shrugged.

"They had specially-adapted guns loaded with beanbag bullets," he told them. "Basically cloth pouches filled with lead shot. It's what used in riots when you really can't afford to hurt anyone." House was staring. They were all staring. "No more lethal than a hard punch to the chest."

"Because the Christians had their principles," Wilson surmised. "No one was supposed to get killed."

"And no match for guards with Kevlar vests and real bullets," House said. His head sank back to studying the couch again. "Which makes them idiots."

"None of this will be leaked to the press either," the agent continued. "And if any of you try, believe me, we'll deny it." His attempt to summon ferocity fell flat. Wilson had come to her side to help her coax House from the couch, half-lifting him. The patient was refusing to lean on them, making it difficult, his small form of protest at having been rescued, his do-not-resuscitate after the fact. He was putting weight on his right foot, pain opioided away for the moment, then stumbling when the muscle didn't support him. "I don't have a leg," he mumbled. "You don't have a brain," Wilson told him. "Twenty-three Vicodin."

Then they were through the circus of cameras and hurled questions on the street below, the CA men on their heels. The boss agent offered his car, with its light and sound effects that would get them to Princeton-Plainsboro faster, and Wilson's glance at her said he felt the same way she did, that they couldn't care less what the media would make of a roughed-up looking House getting into a CA vehicle. The car was fast. At the hospital she left him in Wilson's care and went to sit in her office. Phone messages had piled up. The transplant committee meeting started in five minutes. The October cold that had caught at her skin when she ran out without a coat bled away from her. She pumped warmth through herself and out, sensed herself to be a huge vascular system, channeling warmth through the hospital with her work, keeping it alive when it became chill and inhuman. It was what she did, and she suddenly couldn't. A ball of ice still hung inside her, the memory of House's blue lips, sheets over bodies. The leaves that fell outside her window, twisting until they lay still on the ground. Little blood-hued sheets. She tried to conjure an image of Ailyn McCullough, risen from the dead, walking through her door, but all that would come was a vision of House, blustering big and furious over some slight to his diagnostic authority. Love could rise from the dead, or so she had always thought, that well of hope in people, finding fabulous ways to get what it needed, asserting itself if you only let go and tried something insane. That was close, Wilson had said. She was a slave to routine and her inhibitions; she would never fall into that insanity, but she could be made dizzy by the beauty of it. Outside the wind had stilled in the early autumn dusk; her desk lamp was a glow of comfort. They were all leaves in the wind. He might very well keep working at the hospital, might even come blustering in the door every week or so, for a time, but the same House would never be back. Because he had gone where she couldn't.

_Good luck to you, Greg House. I love_

****


	20. Epilogue: A Thread That Has No End

**20. Epilogue: A Thread That Has No End**

The man in the seat beside Kevin Butler was thin, with penetrating eyes and a – presumably practiced – sarcastic undertone in his voice that made the stewardess look insulted when he asked for more ice. Butler waited until the cabin settled into movies and the man opened a medical journal.

"Sorry, but you look familiar to me."

The blue eyes turned to him.

"I mean, have you been on TV?" Nothing. "It's just that it's going to drive me nuts." He uttered a few more idiocies. "Like it's eight more hours to Copenhagen –"

"Have you had that hyperlogia of yours looked into?" The man's voice sounded doctorly now.

"My what?"

"It's been known to be fatal." He gazed for a moment longer, then seemed to give in. "Try terrorism."

"Oh…_right_. That. Nealy and all…that." Butler looked away, down at the laptop he had taken out to pretend he was getting some work done. "You were the boyfriend."

"Husband."

"Husband? I didn't know that." He bit his lip. More idiocy.

"Doesn't matter now." The man was gazing out the window on his side now, where the berry-blue of night met the end of the world. "It's been four years."

"Surprised they let you out of the country." If he was going to say stupid things the rest of the flight he could just as well pretend to sleep.

The iron gaze had leveled on him again. "Surprised they let you out of your barn."

"So what's in Copenhagen?"

"The Tenth International Conference on Diagnostic Medicine. And yes, I had a hard time convincing the Powers That Be Morons to let me go. That I would be an asset to the American contingent and wouldn't secretly be guzzling ale with wild Danish terrorists every night."

"That was good of them."

A mean smile played around his eyes. "Oh yes, the U.S. government's learned to be good in the last few years. You can only get so many pies in the face before you start to duck." The man named House glanced at him with the gleam of an agenda. "Let's see – " Something had made him want to talk. "There's the pie of their star prisoner being killed in an escape attempt. I suppose you remember that. Could have gone in their favor, of course, except someone leaked the news that the terrorists didn't use kill ammunition, to stay true to their non-violent principles, and that that's what got them all killed, including Ailyn McCullough. Garnered the Christians a lot of sympathy and made CA out to be the meanies. Pie Number Two – hope you're following me here - this guy Henderson turns himself in and confirms that Blenheim was the terrorist Darren Blackwell, so McCullough is exonerated after the fact. She was actually saving the country from another Dirty May when she shot her CA boss. Didn't help her much since she was dead." He twisted away again for a moment to the window and swallowed before turning back. "An awful lot of pie on CA's face by this time. Then Number Three - a letter shows up, the one Michael Nealy sent to authorities before the world ever blew up, listing Kyle Henderson and Darren Blackwell as radicals, basically proof that Nealy had done everything he could to keep it all from happening. No one knows where the letter's been all this time or who's now making it public on the Internet, but CA can't even see straight for all the cream in their eyes, so Michael Nealy is exonerated too. Didn't do twiddly for him either, since he'd died in prison of a heart attack when he heard his daughter had been shot." Another sadness blanked his face. Across the aisle a woman laughed, engrossed in her movie; throughout the cabin blue-lit faces smirked or looked bored while others slept, everyone caught in their little world.

"Leaving you," Butler finally said.

"Leaving Norxylam. That was the pie they choked on. Still being debated, that one, since Saunders-Glesco refused to recall it, but my little nudge during the trial caused so much suspicion that you won't find a doctor today who'll prescribe it. I should have gone public with it sooner, might have saved more lives." The last was said with a fading thoughtfulness as he twirled the glass with its remnant of scotch and then bolted down the dregs. "I was Hamlet."

"Who?"

"Guy in this play by William Shakespeare."

"Sorry, I'm not into the Broadway stuff."

His smile was for himself. "Not someone anyone's ever heard of. Minor writer, 1500's. I did a lot of research for a while, came across his plays and liked them. He might have become popular if the world had taken a different course. Hamlet was one of his characters. This guy sitting on the fence, who could never make up his mind what to do about evil in the world until it was too late."

The guy was hard to follow, fast brain constantly shunting to a new track, but he could grasp the basic poignancy. He knew the regret of having waited too long with things.

"Which comes back to why they let me go on this trip."

"Which is?"

"Appeasement. To prove they're trying to make amends for being such fuck-ups. Society's changed so much since it all happened that they have to watch what they're doing." House bent closer. "In reality they've been pooping in their pants ever since they took the no-fly off my passport. That's why they've assigned an agent to tail me every second of the trip."

"You think so?"

"He's sitting next to me."

They were in a two-seater row. The small heart-stopping moment of being made was something Butler wasn't used to. He waited a long moment before shrugging. "You're smarter than they said you'd be."

"Unless that bulge under the ankle of your pants is a Guinness-record sized epidermal cyst, it's a gun. Plus you blinked a lot when I talked about the pie in CA's eye. So now that we've got that straight – " House yawned. "Since I'll be seeing so much of you in Copenhagen, if only at a distance, I'd rather get some shut-eye myself now so I don't have to look at you." He put away his journal, turned his back on his shadower and was snoring softly in under a minute.

Better than smart, Butler realized. Gregory House was a magician, pretending to show all his cards in a masterly play at misdirection. Anyone else would have kept secret the fact that they knew they were being followed. He would have to stick closer to House than an epidermal cyst, he supposed, if he didn't want to lose him – and lose his job in the process - in Copenhagen. The thought kept the CA agent awake the rest of the flight.

****

He could see the shape his face would have in age – the lines already deepening, a thinness to the lips. The Copenhagen hotel was an airy womb of wood paneling and glass that included mirrored walls in the elevator. He rode down to the lobby alone, studying himself in the mirror. He had passed the half-century mark in the four years since she had been gone. A milestone that had meant nothing to him, though his face conceded it. A lonely face, with lips that touched no one. Arriving in the lobby he waved to the CA agent tailing him whose name he hadn't bothered to ask, the guy stupidly pretending to read a newspaper by the door, and then he picked out the most likely-looking clerk at the desk, a buxom blonde that approached his ideal of the Scandinavian beauty.

"You know who I am?"

"Yes, Dr. House."

"So you probably know my political situation. Look, I need a favor. I'm being followed, not supposed to leave the conference I spent a gruesomely boring day in yesterday, but I want to see more of your beautiful country than just a slide show on epithelial cells and I want to see it without being followed. Think you can help me out?" He let his eyes drop to the two hundred-dollar bills half hidden by his hand.

He had picked the right clerk. "Keep that." She gave him a straightforward look, not letting her eyes wander to seek his follower, then spoke more loudly. "We have safe-deposit boxes where you can put in your watch, Dr. House. Here, in our back office." She directed him behind the counter, couching him from sight of the lobby, and then down a hallway to a back door. His heart was pounding a little harder than it should have been. "You can circle around to the cab-stand when you are quick," she told him. She looked like she was having fun. "Good luck."

Then it was "Go go go" to the cab driver who had been half-asleep, a glance at the hotel entrance where he could see the CA agent through the glass, looking back into the lobby only to turn at the last moment to see a cab containing his suspect peeling away from the front. The agent's face was a kick. He hoped it made him lose his job.

"Trelleborg," he told his driver and leaned back.

An hour outside of Copenhagen lay the open-air museum of the ancient Viking fortress, oldest remnant of a warrior caste. Trelleborg was nothing more than a ring mound, he realized, as he paid the admission and limped down the long graveled walk that wound through meadow grass to the rounded hill which, according to the brochure, had once been topped by mighty wooden walls. The earth fortress had the shape of a modern-day stadium, with an entranceway cut through the circle which had once been the main gate. The sun had left his throat dry, his heart pounding again – from the walk, he told himself - and he stopped outside the ring, at the dry moat which, a sign informed him, had contained not only water but long sharpened wood spikes to impale enemies who tried to leap the moat and climb the walls. He decided he liked the Vikings.

His leg throbbed. There were few people around. A group of Japanese tourists appeared from the swath of gateway and he took a deep breath and entered the ring.

She was sitting at the base of the hill inside, knees drawn up. Her hair had grown out enough to make a braid. For a second he thought she wasn't going to look up, fear that it wouldn't be true, he knew, the same fear that had kept him standing outside at the moat for ten minutes, but her eyes, cast down, were on the tip of the cane and then his face, and then he had dropped beside her and they were buried in each other. Words that were only dissected jumbles floated up between them.

"I didn't know if –"

"The one-time pad worked."

Two months before, his favorite medical journal had printed some highly discrepant data on depression which, when decoded with his pad, revealed the name of a tourist site in Denmark and a date.

"A group of Christian doctors here worked it so the bad data got in." She was stroking his arm, a soft obsessive movement as though she thought he might disappear again while his lips lingered in her hair. Touching once more after so long. He didn't trust his throat. Crying hadn't been part of the plan. Laughing apparently was, because she was doing both, and then he was too, uncontrollable whoops that turned to tearful giggles. Around them the few tourists, stretched in the sun on the hill or exploring the ancient foundations in the center, were locked in another world, oblivious to their little drama of happiness. A group of children nearby scrambled up and down the slope, their play shouts a punctuation to his joy.

"I was so afraid you'd believe whatever story they put out." Ailyn finally looked at him. She had wiped her own eyes with big swipes of her hands, not caring if anyone saw. Four years had left her face harder, he could tell, though it was soft now looking at him, melted with emotion. It was still the loveliest thing he had ever seen and he shook his head.

"Galt warned me," he told her, "when we talked in the restroom at the trial. Told me not to believe what I heard. That I would have to be an actor."

"You must have done one hell of a job."

"I was no slouch." He told her about the plans made with Wilson in advance, the stomach pump purposefully placed at the back of the closet. Bourbon poured down his shirt front.

"The pills had to be real. And it had to be timed right. Or I might have stopped breathing ten minutes before anyone got there." The acting had been easy, the very real fear gnawing at him that the news story might not be manipulated, that her Christian rescuers had failed. The layer-upon-layer hide-and-seek game he had played with CA. "They bought it. I think Cuddy had it figured out. She never said anything." _Not in four years_. "When I told her a month ago that I was going to the Copenhagen conference, I believe she knew then that I wouldn't be back."

The words that should have been sad echoed in a hollow place inside him. He felt light, breezy. If he didn't look at the world it wasn't there, no people, no hard four years, only their two forms on a hill, so close their scents mingled, and so he kept his eyes on her and kissed her again.

"CA must have been on you like a fungus."

"Ah, fungus is the operative word. Not known to move very fast." He described the hotel lobby trick. "I had to look like I was headed to the conference. All I could bring with me was what I could carry on me." And in the end that was all that had mattered. He had said goodbye to his guitars before he left America. Ailyn rubbed the back of her hand against his where it lay lightly on his leg, acknowledging the sacrifice, and their rings touched. All he could carry on him.

"Time for your story," he told her, and watched the hard lines around her mouth deepen.

The Christians had slipped a message to her after the trial so she had known what to expect. It had still been terrifying, cuffed in the back of the van as they drove, not knowing if and when it would happen.

"The story about the beanbag bullets was true," she said. "What got lost in the telling is that the Christians had a mole among the guards, who used tear gas to take them out the moment the van stopped. The guards didn't have a chance to shoot at their attackers before they were blinded by the gas, on the ground and cuffed. No one was killed, on either side." The first thing she had seen when the doors were thrown open was a gas-masked figure, Robert Chase from his voice, tossing her a mask of her own and yelling for her to put it on. She had only learned much later that she was supposed to be dead and bullet-ridden.

They sat in silence for a moment watching the tourists. "You can work here," she informed him. "Under your own name. Denmark doesn't extradite. English is an international language in medicine and I've found a hospital that can't wait for you to start."

It was like her, the old her. For him the four years had been like one long dark rainy day that might never end and it must have been the same for her, but she had always been able to substitute pragmatism for the melancholy, just keep doing what you have to do.

A boy who looked to be three or four detached himself from the racing children and sank down in front of Ailyn. "Can I have a cookie, Mama?" he asked her. The boy had curly brown hair and blue eyes. She dug in her bag, not looking up, and handed him a cookie. The boy stared at the stranger beside his mother and then bounded away.

The hill was spinning. He had to hold on to the ground, palms pressed flat. Ailyn still hadn't looked back at him. "I was going to tell you in the motel room," she finally said, "but then we were arrested. I'd…stopped taking the pill a month before." She took a shuddering breath. "I was so scared we were going to be separated and I knew I wouldn't survive without…something of you. In me. Beside me."

The fist that had held his heart from the second he understood let go, blood pumping back through him; he could see his hands pressed into the grass flushing red, little storms in his fingers. If you could have thyroid storm, he supposed you could have a heart hurricane. When he looked at his son, the light glinting in his hair, shouting Danish to his interim playmates, he felt he would burst. _You thought you were alive again already but there was more_.

"Are you mad at me?" Ailyn asked. "That I stopped taking the pill without telling you?"

He shook his head until he could speak. That she could think that. "It's the most beautiful thing anyone's ever done for me." Her eyes lit up. "Oh _shit_." She looked alarmed again. "I'm a _dad_! I skipped class the day they covered that subject. I don't know how to _be_ a dad."

"Greg, it'll work. I've always told him his father had to be away traveling. We'll just tell him you've finally…come home." The words were like a spell. "We'll manage it. Just…be you." From anyone else the command would have meant the speaker had no idea who he was. From her it was a seal of trust. "His name is Michael," she added.

For a moment they watched little Mike play. "I wish my father could be here," she murmured. "I wish he could just be alive to know…" She glanced at him, a timid look, fear of some new idea he might reject. "Sometimes I tell myself he does know." He began to understand. "My…thoughts on things have changed a lot, Greg. I never realized how much strength I was getting from Christianity without believing in it – during the mastectomy and through all the things that happened to us. I was denying it inside, but it was working for me. I'm in a group here that worships openly. It's so much easier when it's not all tangled up with resentment about my dad's imprisonment and false charges of terrorism."

"Glad you're telling me this. Now I can report you. How do you say 'thought police' in Danish? Come to think of it, that CA agent may still be at the hotel."

Her smile was glorious. "I…want to raise Mike the way my dad raised me, but explaining to him what it's all about."

He nodded and it was simple. It had been a revelation, when he first realized it, that at some point he had reached a place where he could accept someone else's view without arguing. Wilson had done that for him. They had spent four years not talking about things, except on days when he had needed it to keep from going insane, and then only in coded words, out at their picnic table in the park. He had come to see that the world did not end because someone thought differently than he did. And he couldn't be sure he wasn't a little aberrant himself. If he had learned to draw strength from himself, to bear the pain that still wracked him night and day, then that strength had been given to him, whether by chance or not, a present wrapped up and gleaming in the shape of his love for her. The fact that he had kept going was a kind of religion, faith in the unseen. He had come to love his life, and that was a miracle. He was as aberrant as the rest of them.

"A few miles from here," Ailyn mused, "there are neolithic tombs, much older than the Vikings. Huge stone cairns built by hand, when hands were all they had. The people who buried their dead put jewelry in with the corpses and scattered flowers over them. They had a religion. They believed in some kind of resurrection. It's…like we've always had this need – " She ran her hands through her hair. "Death makes us religious, I think. You can love someone, love their mind so much you want it to go on forever because it's beautiful -" He was floating again, light inside, and he leaned into her. "And when you see it stop in this world, it's only natural to want to believe it's still alive somewhere else. I think that's how it all got started, in our heads."

"Belief in an afterlife is only one small aspect of religion," he murmured.

"I know. It just… seems so pertinent. When you love."

At the bottom of the hill the boy named Michael stopped playing long enough to look back at him, a preparatory glance, as though he sensed that the man beside his mother would play a role in his life, his face curious and open to whatever the world had to offer, then the figure turned and launched itself back into the game with a shout. The sun had warmed him, easing the ache in his leg. Bodies and the earth seem lifted, borne up by the very light that anchored them. He could lie back and look up at the sky. On the grass his son played and his wife gazed at him and he felt as if he would live forever.

****

END of story

……………………………

(A/N: For those of you who wrote _She's dead?_ – it's not over until the tall guy twirls his cane.)

(More A/N: Just _wheew_. I never expected this to get as big as it did. Sad to end it, but after almost exactly a year (and 100,000 words – a first for me) I'm also a little happy to move on. The next story – really a short one this time – is already in the works.

Write on!

The lyrics House hears when certain things happen to him in the story are from the following songs:

"You must not know about me" – _Irreplaceable_, Beyonce

"Bucket's got a hole in it" – _My Bucket's Got A Hole In It_, Hank Williams/Clarence Williams

"Can't get off this ride" – _Hot N Cold_, Katy Perry

"All the people who were doin' wrong" – _Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress_, The Hollies

"Blood at the root" - _Strange Fruit_, Billie Holiday/Abel Meeropol

"Prisoners of our own device" – _Hotel California_, The Eagles

"Wish I was sober" – _1973_, James Blunt

"My poetry to protect me" – _I Am A Rock_, Simon and Garfunkel

"I remember when I lost my mind" – _Crazy_, Gnarls Barkley

"Hoping for the best, expecting the worst" – _Forever Young_, Alphaville

"Sunny days that I thought would never end" – _Fire and Rain_, James Taylor

"The questions run so deep" – _The Logical Song_, Supertramp

"Hoping it was a lie" – _After the Gold Rush_, Neil Young

"Beneath your wisdom like a stone" – _Suzanne_, Leonard Cohen

"The world's a better place when it's upside down" – _Nothing Sweet About Me_, Gabriella Cilmi

"If the boys wanna fight" – _The Boys Are Back In Town_, Thin Lizzy

"It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah" – _Hallelujah_, Leonard Cohen

"When the future's architectured by a carnival of idiots" – _Violet Hill_, Coldplay

"All is loneliness" – _All Is Loneliness_, Janis Joplin

"A thread that has no end" – _All of My Love_, Led Zeppelin


End file.
